Material Witness

"Masterful . . . [Machado's] poems—almost entirely long and exhilaratingly intricate—explore notions of involvement and participation in the consumptive and colonial forces of late capitalism, in the plundering of the living world. And, in so doing, they unpack materiality (and the language of materiality) itself. "
—Christopher Kondrich, LARB
"Smart and wise and risky, [Machado's] 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
"The world of matter and words entwine in this rich and demanding collection from Machado. . . the borders between the physical and the spiritual, the material and the verbal, are blurred. . . Readers up for a challenge will be rewarded."
—Publishers Weekly

"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. . . Machado’s poems resist any kind of generalization about what they are, or what they do—they are too multifarious, too mobile for that. Instead, they demand that you attend, almost at the letter of the level, to the language that oozes around you as you move through her poems."
—Toby Altman, Annulet

"Material Witness proves itself able to imagine a different kind of living and a different poetic form, one that entails embracing indeterminacy, transformation, and interchange. . . the material witness, struggling to look clearly upon a world from which she cannot find the adequate distance, is not only a dilemma but also an invitation, the conditions of possibility for a kind of work (poetic or otherwise) which will radically transform both self and environment."
—Sammy Aiko Zimmerman, antiphony

"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 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

"Machado's poems have a lush quality. . . she writes around and through subjects with charged lyrics, providing an electrical current even along the most direct sentences."
—rob mclennan, rob mclennan's blog

"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