Material Witness

“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.”

“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.”

“Aditi Machado is a poet of spectacular precision, vocabulary, political allegory, and formal excitement. I love the rangy syntax and energetic sorrow 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.”