Material Witness (2024)
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Reviews: Antiphony | Heavy Feather Review | Kings Of Train | Literary Hub | Los Angeles Review of BOOKs | Publishers Weekly | Rob McClennan | West Trade Review
Recommended by: Toby Altman | Literary HuB | Carl Phillips
Podcast: Critical Literary Consumption (Sep. 30, 2024)
Interview: Nightboat Blog
ESSAYS/FEATURES: On “Concerning CUlinary Matters” @ Lit Hub | On “Material Witness” @ Poetry Society of America
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
Praise:
“I feel like the poets who really matter to me are the ones who have a distinctive way of handling syntax, a specific music that organizes their sentences. Think about the early Leslie Scalapino, or Harryette Mullen, or Lyn Hejinian, or, fuck it, John Milton. Anyway, over her first three books, Aditi Machado has announced herself as the composer of such music—specific, strange, hard to describe. 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. This new book, Material Witness continues to elaborate what such music can do …”—Toby Altman, Annulet
“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 (advance praise)
“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 (advance praise)
“What makes ‘Bent Record’ remarkable, and what it makes clear, is how cleverly Machado portrays poetry (and the material of poetry) as within the domain of empire, that there is nothing beyond its reach—even the poem’s attempts to extradite itself from empire or to rectify its fallibility in some way.”—Christopher Kondrich, Los Angeles Review of Books
“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 (advance praise)
“She writes on history, motion, starlight; she writes around and through subjects with charged lyrics …”—rob mcclennan
“[Her] new book is so smart and wise and risky, as her 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
“Machado is a chemist in love with wind.”—Barton Smock
“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 (advance praise)
“Machado’s is a poetics in which sovereignty—the authority of the body over itself, which assumes a single and stable concept of the body ‘itself’—dissolves as soon as it is constituted. Bodies fall apart, interpenetrate, transform, and reconstitute: the flesh melts into the vegetable, night ‘slit[s] your mineral bosom,’ a ‘radical in your gut… measure[s] the foreclosure of history,’ and you are always ‘in the middle of the thing.’ Doubt creeps in—‘Could it be you were divided into a body politic?’—and we realize soon enough that there is no sovereignty here.”—Sammy Aiko Zimmerman, antiphony