Conversities

by Srikanth Reddy, Dan Beachy-Quick

Poetry. "The written 'I' is famously slippery, and never more than in this seamless collaboration that places the pronoun's definition at its constantly decentered center. In four distinct sections, all perfecting a language rich in intriguing specifics and delightfully sharp surprises, the collection shows two contemporary masters in a brand new light, creating a new 21st century poet right on the spot, and one with a particularly promising and important voice."—Cole Swensen

Genres: Poetry

106 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

Srikanth Reddy is the author of Underworld Lit (Wave Books, 2020), Voyager—named one of the best books of poetry in 2011 by The New Yorker, The Believer, and NPR—and Facts for Visitors, which won the 2005 Asian American Literary Award. He has written on poetry for The New York Times and The New Republic, and his book of literary criticism, Changing Subjects: Digressions in Modern American Poetry, was published by Oxford University Press in 2012. The NEA, the Creative Capital Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation have awarded him grants and fellowships, and in Fall 2015, he delivered the Bagley Wright Lectures in Poetry. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the doctoral program in English at Harvard University, he is currently an Associate Professor of English at the University of Chicago.

Reviews

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collaboration in fourteeners by two Chicago poets, Dan Beachy-Quick and Srikanth Reddy, does not identify anywhere within whose work is whose. Though I suspect I hear Reddy in the passages of more insouciant wit, let's grant that the project's experiment would wager against supposition. As you read the double crown of sonnets, natch, alternation becomes something of the experience of reading through the poems, and the section-page separating the two crowns signs itself in the helix. The next section is in terza rima and that form tropes the helix again. So there's much fun in formal enactment going on, which is what you'd expect of collaboration. There's also plenty of homage and derivation, and I forgot I expected that until I had to remember.

[Tara · Rating 1 out of 5]

I am not your emotional tampon.

[hh · Rating 4 out of 5]

amazing collaboration that i would like to own and be able to revisit.