Material Witness (2024)
Order at Nightboat or YOUR LOCAL
Reviews: Antiphony | Kings Of Train | Los Angeles Review of BOOKs | Publishers Weekly
Podcast: Critical Literary Consumption (Sep. 30, 2024)
Interview: Nightboat Blog
Excerpts Online:
“Material Witness” (excerpt) as “Then” | poets.org
“Material Witness” (excerpts) as “Then” | The Baffler
“What USE” | ANNULET
“Bent Record” | Annulet
“Feeling Transcripts from the Outpost” | PlaceS
“now” (excerpts) | BOMB
“now” (excerpts) | Copenhagen
“now” (excerpt) | Poetry
Advance Praise:
“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 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
“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
“Aditi Machado is a poet of spectacular precision, vocabulary, political allegory, and formal excitement. I love the rangy syntax and energetic sorrow (not a contradiction for Machado) of Material Witness, a new book of long-and-longing-poems concerned with the lyric, empire, the limit and necessity of “witness,” all manner of consumption, pain, the earth, suffering, and survival. I want to hear this “militantly aroused resident alien of every which nowhere” speak on everything. Machado’s poems are deftly engineered sonic environments, languid or booming or dissonant at will, always absolutely thrilling to encounter. Material Witness is a deeply moving book asking how to live, and look, now.”—Wendy Xu