Material Witness

Aditi Machado

A series of meditative long poems that ritualize perception as a way of maintaining kinship with the non-human world.

In Material Witness, the poet as human subject keeps vigil over the material world as the quotidian unfolds. The line between observer and observed blurs as non-human agency reveals itself, its own kind of witnessing.

In her long poem "Concerning Matters Culinary" inspired by the first Latin cookbook, Machado activates the living matter of gustatory life with wry humor and subtle critique. Encouraging us to eschew nostalgia for deep presence, Machado's poems remind us that "experience is phenomenal in its segues."

Aditi Machado is a poet, translator, and essayist. Her second book of poems Emporium (2020) received the James Laughlin Award. Her other works include the poetry collection Some Beheadings (2017), a translation from the French of Farid Tali's Prosopopoeia (2016), and several chapbooks the most recent of which are a long poem called now (2020) and an essay titled The End (2020). Machado's work appears in journals like BOMB, Lana Turner, Volt, The Chicago Review, Western Humanities Review, and Jacket2. A former Poetry Editor for Asymptote, she works as an Associate Professor at the University of Cincinnati.