Poet in a bear suit

Facts for Visitors, Srikanth Reddy's first collection, thrives in exotic and surreal landscapes: footpaths with "a steady stream of green ants," "a crumbling aqueduct," and "the hanging gardens of sleep," to name a few; and Reddy's subject matter, diction and choices of form further the investigation his settings instigate, probing the lines between the known world and the unknown, the inherited, now-deteriorating idiom and a new kind of lyric speech, and formal and free-verse. The book is an exquisite parcel of prose-poems, villanelles and terza rima, all executed with apparent ease, snugly packaged by Reddy's eclectic imagination