First I agree to look upon the city.There is a rhythm properly incensed.A church rings clear through my doubts.I decline all things in respect to how I see them.The dative reigns. I like that pileuplike ornaments of queens. Then I look againat the heap, then I struggle to seehow each body is separate, no precisionthat isn’t imprecision.
from Social Gesture
Aditi Machado
Feature Date
- December 26, 2020
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Excerpted from EMPORIUM: by Aditi Machado.
Published by Nightboat Books 2020.
Copyright © 2020 by Aditi Machado.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Aditi Machado is the author of two books of poetry, Emporium and Some Beheadings, which received, respectively, the James Laughlin Award and The Believer Poetry Award, and the translator of Farid Tali’s novel Prosopopoeia. She has published widely in journals such as The Chicago Review, Lana Turner, The Rumpus, Volt, and Western Humanities Review, as well as in chapbook form. A former Poetry Editor for the translation journal Asymptote, she currently works as an Assistant Professor at the University of Cincinnati.
Winner of the 2019 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets
"Aditi Machado’s Emporium takes us on a tour of the development of mercantilism that gradually and deftly builds up into a critique of capitalism and its plundering. Her response to the resulting ‘emporium’ and its inevitable clichés is a language of resistance, but also one of delight, pleasure, and profound discovery. These poems rearrange and reorient the social and the political, making room for the ineffable, exposing a commerce of both oppression and expression in pieces that are alternately meditative, cinematic, playful, and searing—and always linguistically surprising. Never didactic, it’s a work that comes from the margins—and from many of them simultaneously, decentering her center of trade and commerce, and leaving us with an emporium of possibility made by a magician’s hands and a visionary’s eyes."
—Gillian Conoley, Fady Joudah, and Cole Swensen (Laughlin Award Judges Citation)
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