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."

About the Author
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.

Reviews
"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

"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

Book Information
ISBN 9781643622446
Author Aditi Machado
Format Paperback
Page Count 80
Imprint Nightboat Books
Publisher Nightboat Books