Material Witness
Will be published approx. on 5. December 2024
Book
Paperback/Softback
80 pages
978-1-64362-244-6 (ISBN)
Description
A series of meditative long poems that ritualize perception as a way of maintaining kinship with the non-human world.
In Material Witness, the poet as human subject keeps vigil over the material world as the quotidian unfolds. The line between observer and observed blurs as non-human agency reveals itself, its own kind of witnessing. In her long poem "Concerning Matters Culinary" inspired by the first Latin cookbook, Machado activates the living matter of gustatory life with wry humor and subtle critique. Encouraging us to eschew nostalgia for deep presence, Machado's poems remind us that "experience is phenomenal in its segues."
In Material Witness, the poet as human subject keeps vigil over the material world as the quotidian unfolds. The line between observer and observed blurs as non-human agency reveals itself, its own kind of witnessing. In her long poem "Concerning Matters Culinary" inspired by the first Latin cookbook, Machado activates the living matter of gustatory life with wry humor and subtle critique. Encouraging us to eschew nostalgia for deep presence, Machado's poems remind us that "experience is phenomenal in its segues."
Reviews / Votes
"Masterful . . . [Machado's] poems-almost entirely long and exhilaratingly intricate-explore notions of involvement and participation in the consumptive and colonial forces of late capitalism, in the plundering of the living world. And, in so doing, they unpack materiality (and the language of materiality) itself."-Christopher Kondrich, LARB"Smart and wise and risky, [Machado's] unmistakable sensibility looks both slant and squarely at the particular strangeness of our contemporary moment. I learn so much from Aditi's poems, they show me possibilities I hadn't known of, for what language can do."-Carl Phillips
"The world of matter and words entwine in this rich and demanding collection from Machado . . . the borders between the physical and the spiritual, the material and the verbal, are blurred. . . . Readers up for a challenge will be rewarded."-Publishers Weekly
"Material Witness confirms and expands Machado's striking polyphonic voice, which the returning reader responsively recognizes."-Graziano Kraetli, World Literature Today
"There is the erotic immediacy of her work, and the sticky, chewy abstraction; the sense that a body is present and being erased at the same moment . . . Machado's poems resist any kind of generalization about what they are, or what they do-they are too multifarious, too mobile for that. Instead, they demand that you attend, almost at the letter of the level, to the language that oozes around you as you move through her poems."-Toby Altman, Annulet
"Aditi Machado's latest poetry collection plunges into an extraordinary rendition of the ordinary and reveals the overlapping, entangled, ongoing connections between the speaker and the world that they inhabit . . . Material Witness slips into a slipstream consciousness that constantly reckons with and increasingly melds with the other-than-human world."-Claire Jussel, West Trade Review
"You should read Aditi Machado. You should read everything she writes."-Ashley Honeysett, Heavy Feather Review
"Material Witness proves itself able to imagine a different kind of living and a different poetic form, one that entails embracing indeterminacy, transformation, and interchange . . . the material witness, struggling to look clearly upon a world from which she cannot find the adequate distance, is not only a dilemma but also an invitation, the conditions of possibility for a kind of work (poetic or otherwise) which will radically transform both self and environment."-Sammy Aiko Zimmerman, antiphony
"What we've got here, praise be, is the much-needed sharpening of several extant poetic tools and, by way of those tools, the unearthing (somehow!) of entirely new ones, which is both rare and as it should be. Like a Michael Reafsnyder painting in verse, Material Witness is a most badass gladness to the senses; most melancholy, too, it's the book I most love by a writer I find to be unfailingly smart, occasionally hilarious, and always oddly moving. What a thorny and thoroughgoing joy."-Graham Foust
"Aditi Machado's Material Witness transports us into "the violet unknown" of multiple ecological cusps. Sometimes the "I" performs secret acts against the very nature of self. Other times the "I" speaks viral on the nature of power. And sometimes, in the middle of preparations of a meal, "the ineffable curry leaf / infusing it / refuses this / appropriation," and the book flies away! Machado's collection is meditative, pleasing, a true delight to read and savor."-fahima ife
"Machado's poems have a lush quality . . . she writes around and through subjects with charged lyrics, providing an electrical current even along the most direct sentences."-rob mclennan
"Aditi Machado's Material Witness is powerfully rich and lyrically surprising. Resonant beyond the weariness of history and the ruins of the Anthropocene, this poet precisely judges the intricacies of her time as instructive listening for the future and how we might live in it. To read this book is to witness an imagination transformed by and from within our expanding awareness of what is more than we."-Canisia Lubrin
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Illustrations
Illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 211 mm
Width: 150 mm
Thickness: 13 mm
Weight
159 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-64362-244-6 (9781643622446)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Person
Aditi Machado is a poet, translator, and essayist. Her second book of poems Emporium (2020) received the James Laughlin Award. Her other works include the poetry collection Some Beheadings (2017), a translation from the French of Farid Tali's Prosopopoeia (2016), and several chapbooks, the most recent of which are a long poem called now (2020) and an essay titled The End (2020). Machado's work appears in journals like BOMB, Lana Turner, Volt, The Chicago Review, Western Humanities Review, and Jacket2. A former Poetry Editor for Asymptote, she works as an Associate Professor at the University of Cincinnati.