Aditi Machado
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Emporium

 
 

Praise:

“Emporium is a key contribution to an emerging phenomenon in contemporary poetics—the development of what I am calling a silk poetics.”—Toby Altman, The Georgia Review

“Emporium is, then, a ‘critique,’ again, if you like, of fetishism, but we can’t stop there. It’s even more a ‘critique’ of the material heaviness of modern life, the gravitational heaviness where objects and meditation alike lack the transcendent value that duration, which floats objects in a great glass bowl of time, bestows on them. […] Machado goes further into the predicament of illusory value than any other contemporary poet I know of. Indeed, goes further into anything she broaches. […] As an artist you have to be very lucky or very gifted to create anything so compellingly amiss. If you can do it three times, you are more than lucky. Machado’s is a career to follow.”—Cal Bedient, Lana Turner

“These poems rearrange and reorient the social and the political, making room for the ineffable, exposing a commerce of both oppression and expression in pieces that are alternately meditative, cinematic, playful, and searing—and always linguistically surprising. Never didactic, it’s a work that comes from the margins—and from many of them simultaneously, decentering her center of trade and commerce, and leaving us with an emporium of possibility made by a magician’s hands and a visionary’s eyes.”—Gillian Conoley, Fady Joudah, and Cole Swensen (James Laughlin Award citation)

“‘Wordplay’ isn’t quite the term for what’s going on here; it’s more like linguistic athleticism. If you always choose Scrabble over Risk, crosswords over sudoku, you’ll get so much pleasure from the rhymes and slant rhymes […] double and triple meanings, conjugations and declensions, repetitions that evoke a sense of déjà vu.”—Elisa Gabbert, The New York Times

“VERDICT: A Laughlin Award winner—stunning work for sophisticated readers.”—Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal (starred review)

“Out of the Silk Route we also find what seems to be the book’s politics, dealing with the history and borders of the almost-endless marketplace the world has become. Such markets, built on trade and conquest, always establish centers from which all things extraneous to profit (or the cultural hegemony) become expelled. Against this centrifugal force, the speakers of Emporium resist. […] Machado’s sensuous intelligence is richly complex and always grounded in the everyday of things, in seeing and in touch. And with her cadenced fugal voice, she speaks to the troubles of our time.”—James Scales, Kenyon Review

“[T]he expansive collection from Aditi Machado … is both luxurious and cerebral. … This delightful book is full of depth and discovery.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)