If John Ashbery’s Some Trees marked a new beginning for modern American poetry, Aditi Machado’s Some Beheadings renovates the poetics of indeterminacy for our transnational continous present.—Srikanth Reddy
Some Beheadings is an apt title for Aditi Machado’s daring debut collection. Her work tends toward a poetics that recalls Dickinson’s: “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” Machado is our winner because of her talent at so eloquently stating what these poems leave unsaid. Her work here is to allow the reader to work, to trust the minds of those who encounter her poems. We read as participants and not as the entertained. Machado takes the necessary themes that pervade our twenty-first-century moment and depends on lyric impulse to leave them bare in ways that no television news program ever could: “Sand divines my desiccation. So too with culture, / words I use to speak my distance from the desert. / Culture too resides in me an intercourse most internal.” And this book is “internal” in the best way, as over and again it glows with an introspective power, a power that could be wielded only by a human being.—The Believer Poetry Award 2018 Citation
Entropy’s Best Poetry Books & Poetry Collections 2017
Starred Review in Publishers Weekly
More Reviews at The Brooklyn Rail, EcoTheo Review, Guernica, New Pages, On the Seawall, rob mcclennan’s blog, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Tarpaulin Sky, West Branch, Western Humanities Review, & Yes Poetry
Interview by Zack Anderson at American Microreviews & Interviews
Interview by S. Yarberry at Hell’s Printing Press
“A conversation between poet-grammarians: Excerpts” / Co-interview with Serena Chopra at Jacket2