Aditi Machado
Some Beheadings.jpg

Some Beheadings

 

Praise:

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

Poetry is the one genre of writing that can give priority to the non-sensical and overtly sensual ways that language makes meaning. Machado delights in the slippages between words, in the sounds they make together, and in their rhythmic play. And yet, these are thinking poems, poems about ideas—they are, in fact, philosophical poems (and as such, they are unfashionable and deeply needed). This meeting of mind and body, this dusty walk for I and I, is the road of poetic invention.—Julie Carr, The Brooklyn Rail

“These beheadings are her leaves of grass, and announce the arrival of a poet of great originality and depth.”—Jason Myers, Western Humanities Review

“[A] labyrinthine sensorium where thinking about thinking generates ever more pleasures.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“It’s thrilling to read a language poet of such powers.”—Ben Purkert, Guernica

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. Tracing migratory routes through the thickets and deserts of signification—from the Western Ghats to Marienbad and beyond—Machado arrives at something like a spiritual allegory for the disenchanted. … Yet the spectre of sovereignty, in Machado’s literary imagination, remains ever haunted by its own linguistic predication. “I have lived,” observes this incomparable elegist of belonging, “is a way of saying something ceased.”—Srikanth Reddy (advance praise)

“Machado’s tool is … the camera obscura that is the lyric poem, the poem of the self, performed as role, as experiment, as nano-surgery. … To be able to see and understand herself, Machado has to leave herself, behead herself—the violence that the lyric does when it turns a particular flesh-and-blood person into an abstract, disembodied vocal entity. Machado shows what it is like to dismantle the dismantler.”—Kylan Rice, West Branch

“Machado draws on this most classic of poetic functions—loss of one’s self—by coordinating the interesting and the sublime, as received categories, as received circumstances, so that exhilaration happens.”—Nathaniel Rosenthalis, On the Seawall