Emporium

by Aditi Machado

In Emporium, Aditi Machado investigates transnationalism and translation in poems that follow a merchant woman as she travels a twenty-first century “silk route.” As on the original silk route, this merchant is engaged in economic transactions but also cultural exchanges, un-monetizeable reciprocities, the sensory excesses of the marketplace: coins moving from hand to hand, the smell of food and sweat infusing the air, the “noise” of translation and multilingualism. Is this tradeswoman in control of her “destiny”/business or is she a commodity of impenetrable global forces? Her investigative, digressive travel seems a way to interrogate history and money and her own entanglement in such irresistible threads.

Genres: Poetry

112 pages, Paperback

First published October 27, 2020

Reviews

[Daniel · Rating 3 out of 5]

The poet exhibits a high level of skill with experimental free verse and a rich vocabulary, but the volume ultimately reads like academic poetry. There’s nothing raw, compelling, or experiential. It’s an intellectual exercise.

[S P · Rating 4 out of 5]

Accents ascend the soundfield, bonny
suns climb the vaulted ceiling; magnets.

My senses, cursive, seek an angle;
sensing danger, name an enemy nylon.

—'Emporium'

[Kent · Rating 5 out of 5]

For reading this book, it might first be useful to imagine the order on one of those tapestries you might see at a museum. They should be the tapestries that evoke a broad landscape, a city, a “nature scene” that is more about animals threading their bodies among verdant forest-ish figures. It’s an order that I don’t always do an adequate job reading enough into. Like I’m not a good viewer of tapestries, because I wish I could be more conscious of all the geometries and visual tropes and order. I wish I could grasp the ultimate order of a tapestry, but I’m often thinking about details as decorative touches. Which they are. But there is something more than just decoration happening.

However deficient I am with viewing that kind of art, I read Machado like her poems are assembling a tapestry. Or they’re enacting a tapestry. Or they perform in language how a tapestry seems to exist in a static state on a wall, knowing poems aren’t static. They exist over a time. Even if their time is felt like an aspic congealing on a plate. Think, for instance, how in the book’s opening section a tree line establishes the texture and boundary line of a city. In a subsequent section, crowded wares evoke an emporium. And in still another section (”or”) the meaningfulness of adjacency. Where one idea, or one object, or one experience is placed beside something, there is something to be understood from that. Like if there were pages taken out of an archive (a gesture Machado does in one of the book’s sections), and some text were deleted, there would be the fact that what are now framed as “fragments” appear to be separate from one another (because of what the poet had deleted), but they must be related to one another. Because they are part of the same document. It’s just a few lines of intervening text that have been taken out.

And it’s like OMG that could be what a tapestry is! Or maybe every emporium visit could be read or interpreted or mimetically inscribed as a tapestry. Or what if experience, which poems are so accustomed to relating, could be stuffed into a tapestry’s mold, like what I see in “Meadow Interregnum.” Yes, I’m doing the wrong thing for someone reviewing a book. I’m letting my enthusiasm for this one reading be the reading. But what I hope someone reading this would see is Machado playing with stasis and the unavoidable temporality of language. And you could read every instance of “tapestry” as “descriptive observation.” One where the poet exaggeratedly sees the world around her. And makes a language to accommodate that seeing.

[Lena · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading the last few poems of this book in the bath was really a lovely experience so I think i will read again, even though I understood about 1/2 of the words in here

[Katherine · Rating 1 out of 5]

I think I just missed the point

[RMR · Rating 5 out of 5]

From NYTIMES -Best Poetry of 2020
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/12/bo...

EMPORIUM, by Aditi Machado. (Nightboat, 112 pp., paper, $16.95.) “Wordplay” isn’t quite the term for what’s going on here; it’s more like linguistic athleticism. If you always choose Scrabble over Risk, crosswords over sudoku, you’ll get so much pleasure from the rhymes and slant rhymes (“The body is pronounced bawdy”; “It’s like innocence way off / in the distance”), double and triple meanings, conjugations and declensions, repetitions that evoke a sense of déjà vu — “Fold this” or “Fold it” or “I fold,” etc., occurs as a refrain that seems to half-reset things, like cutting a deck of cards, or twisting them into a Möbius strip. “The camera is deft, so I am dire. / I look into the mounting of desire … surely, the darkness, metonymic, shall / proceed. / I fold this.”

[G · Rating 4 out of 5]

Traducciones de poemas de Aditi Machado. La poesía queda al descubierto. Es un complot internacional. Cada voz se integra en un macrosistema de voces que asedian al lenguaje más allá de cualquier frontera. Los poemas de Aditi Machado suenan tan argentinos como el objetivismo argentino de los noventa en su reedición del siglo XXI. También tienen su saturación neobarroca. Es ecléctica, intensa, fulminante. Una seña particular de Machado es la erudición. Lo coral no sólo es ese canon a mil voces, sino el diálogo vivo con vivos y muertos de la poética universal. Es como si hubiera un universo de voces poéticas sin tiempo ni espacio con el que conversa Machado. Un emporio. Otra marca extraordinaria porque es implícita, no se ve de pleno, pero es eficiente: entre versos Machado te manda a la mierda. Tremenda edición del Taller Chapita. Libro cosido sin lomo, una maravilla.

[Lily · Rating 1 out of 5]

I got to page 47. And I had to force myself to read up that point. I could not continue. It's very bland and dry. Hard to understand in my personal opinion. Half the page is blank perhaps that's creative who knows. There's a lot of complicated words and I don't feel what I read. There's no emotion to what I'm reading.
Because I felt this way up to page 47, I tried to skip ahead and read ahead and I just couldn't complete the book.
Perhaps if people are interested in unique, hard to read things they might enjoy this book, but I personally did not.

[Erik Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

++
For in the beginning there was a sound and the sound
was good. I licked it. It made sense. I milked it.
But you see the war unsettled it. A clean historical
break right down the landing strip of it. I licked it.
Something in the shape of it, something in the
touching of it. The music went out of it. And my desire
for it, a widening gyre. Lyre? You sense it? We lost
our measure. I licked it. This myth.
++

[Justin · Rating 4 out of 5]

At its finest, some of the most ensorcelling poetry of this century. At its weakest moments, diffuse and discursive. Full of wonderful language, wide vocabulary, fine enjambments, and distinct thrust. Evocative commonalities accrete over the 100 pages, layers of silk, dust, globalism, travel, belonging, nations, and personal identity. I'll be thinking about this one for a long while.

[Aolund · Rating 5 out of 5]

Even though some of this was over my head (or in languages I don’t know), I loved this wild and sensual imaginary romp through the emporium/silk route. The use of language was exquisite and defamiliarizing and playful and still managed to really move me often.

[viu xiu]

through to through and all inclusive tale of the after beginnings of the white/slim/skin brixton puma roomie who has to blow his deal on his cup so he can get his mpc which in turn where were you in 92 bro??? where u at?

[Sanchari Sur · Rating 5 out of 5]

An invigorating intellectual exercise. I know I will keep revisiting this text.

[Benjamin Bartu · Rating 5 out of 5]

just astonishing. one of those collections i'll be recommending for years to come

[justin · Rating 4 out of 5]

THIS IS NUTS