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Some Beheadings
Here the "beheaded" poet displaces her mind into the landscape, exploring territories as disparate as India's Western Ghats and the cinematic Mojave Desert, as absurd as insomnia and dream. Some Beheadings asks three questions: "How does thinking happen?" "What does thinking feel like?" "How do I think about the future?" The second question takes primacy over the others, reflecting on what poets and critics have called "the sensuous intellect," what needs to be felt in language, the contours of questions touched in sound and syntax.
- GenresPoetry
112 pages, Kindle Edition
First published October 3, 2017
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
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January 28, 2018"Breakfast makes time out of edibles."
"There are rivers in the distance that milk."
"Somewhere deep darkness is parapet to acts of survival. The strangler prospers in this heat multiplying its arms."
"I cannot tell time without the whip."
"The whole village was there, minus its people."
"A neck spills its faint lesson..."
"The listening I was summoned to perform, I perform it."
"'Walking is the exact balance of spirit and humility'..."
Some of Machado's best lines make me think of cognitive disorders, or possibly early stages of dementia. Others merely, "I wish I'd thought of that." Some of the poems contain quotes from other works, both famous (Ozymandias, The Guermantes Way) and non. I don't know any of those works well enough to recognize what parts of the poems were these quotes.
A blurb on the back warns, "If John Ashbery's Some Trees marked a new beginning for modern American poetry, Aditi Machado's Some Beheadings renovates the poetics of indeterminacy for our transnational continuous present." Just so we're clear.
March 3, 2020
"to fill my life as an index / to feel crying as by onion - there is an astringent for everything. / It is lexical."
"an I is an orient in the sense that all things wend toward me."
"In heat my tongue delivers a sermon like a caress."
"can you wake up / from a sentence like you wake up on the porch?"
"the future is full of suspense / & here is the banal: every thought / I think billows & the weeds continue / so where am I but always moving into / the prophecy a second ahead."
the first time I picked this book up I knew it was too smart for me. That was almost two years ago and now i still feel challenged but i am less attached to "understanding", less eager to decipher, much more comfortable letting language wash over me and mapping what I learn from that unencumbered encounter. Reading these poems is an exercise in surrender. and then in faithful following. aditi machado is writing from/into/between myriad dimensions and I'm launching myself through every portal. Each time i circle back a different moment or line undoes me. I love poems that demand my most meticulous attention, that hold secrets. there's something to be glimpsed if not gleaned from every moment. She writes, "I think / I'm not human. I'm grammarian." I'd say the "I" of these poems is a grammar mystic yet irrefutably human. with remarkable intention & inquiry. With aditi, language is in the best care. read this book if u want ur brain to tingle, if ur seduced by the dimensionality & wonder of words & critical thought, if you want to witness true sonic & syntactic alchemy.
`
"an I is an orient in the sense that all things wend toward me."
"In heat my tongue delivers a sermon like a caress."
"can you wake up / from a sentence like you wake up on the porch?"
"the future is full of suspense / & here is the banal: every thought / I think billows & the weeds continue / so where am I but always moving into / the prophecy a second ahead."
the first time I picked this book up I knew it was too smart for me. That was almost two years ago and now i still feel challenged but i am less attached to "understanding", less eager to decipher, much more comfortable letting language wash over me and mapping what I learn from that unencumbered encounter. Reading these poems is an exercise in surrender. and then in faithful following. aditi machado is writing from/into/between myriad dimensions and I'm launching myself through every portal. Each time i circle back a different moment or line undoes me. I love poems that demand my most meticulous attention, that hold secrets. there's something to be glimpsed if not gleaned from every moment. She writes, "I think / I'm not human. I'm grammarian." I'd say the "I" of these poems is a grammar mystic yet irrefutably human. with remarkable intention & inquiry. With aditi, language is in the best care. read this book if u want ur brain to tingle, if ur seduced by the dimensionality & wonder of words & critical thought, if you want to witness true sonic & syntactic alchemy.
`
December 17, 2021
Conflicting feelings about this collection.
At times, I was envious -- many of the moves that Machado makes in her poems are moves that I have tried to make, though where I am clumsy and inarticulate, she is grace, confidence, and efficiency.
At times, I was reminded quite a bit of Tender Buttons, where the syntax and rhythm are familiar, but the words that live next to each other make sense in ways that you haven't quite acknowledged or recognized as of yet.
At other times, I was frustrated -- how am I supposed to read this, as one long poem? As many small poems connected by theme or image or...? How is a verse like this to be read:
labial
dunes
runes
As labial, dunes, runes? Or as labial...dunes...(pause)...(pause)...runes?
Are dunes labial or runic? Are labial and dunes connected in any way? Having seen undulating dunes, there is a kind of labial beauty to them, and that is simply a wonderful connections of two words I would never have thought belonged together, but without further context, further guidance from the author, it is difficult to know or even wager a guess as to how understanding is formed. That can be frustrating for a reader, especially one like me who is less comfortable with what is sometimes labeled "language poetry." Much of this book falls into this category. When I finish something like this, I wish I had a teacher to help guide my reading, to give me some hand holds to find my way through the text.
At other times, I was simply overwhelmed by the beauty, sometimes surprising and sometime anticipated, of Machado's verse. She is most certainly a poet. A few examples, pulled at random:
'In heat my tongue delivers a sermon like a caress.'
'I am thinking now to describe what it's like to touch something.
What it is to rub off on someone.
When two matters interact should I hope to keep my skin.'
'the white of sheep
invades a field
a circle empties
into another circle.'
'One way to see grammar is to think fields, how bare they are until you look underneath. At their limits are nouns to which you run & you pick them up & cannot.'
'The throat is a corset
I wear, I tighten,
from which I exude.
I eat, I speak,
it is sexual. Prep
work, like eros, is
in the minutiae.'
'So wind is a textual experience. So I revel in its ambiguities. So may I stand whole minutes suffering its arrival at the station. So may I in this manner feel felt in the mind of whatever is greater than I. & in the consideration of that is greater than I I become lost in the folds of eros. & in appearing out of this maze I become ready to speak my name in the stations that ask. This is always & everywhere how I am sculpted, baroque & wavering, submitting my shape to some common stipulations.'
*** *** *** ***
At times I felt I was reading the private prayers of someone. At times I wanted them to hold my hand just a bit and guide me.
At times, I was envious -- many of the moves that Machado makes in her poems are moves that I have tried to make, though where I am clumsy and inarticulate, she is grace, confidence, and efficiency.
At times, I was reminded quite a bit of Tender Buttons, where the syntax and rhythm are familiar, but the words that live next to each other make sense in ways that you haven't quite acknowledged or recognized as of yet.
At other times, I was frustrated -- how am I supposed to read this, as one long poem? As many small poems connected by theme or image or...? How is a verse like this to be read:
labial
dunes
runes
As labial, dunes, runes? Or as labial...dunes...(pause)...(pause)...runes?
Are dunes labial or runic? Are labial and dunes connected in any way? Having seen undulating dunes, there is a kind of labial beauty to them, and that is simply a wonderful connections of two words I would never have thought belonged together, but without further context, further guidance from the author, it is difficult to know or even wager a guess as to how understanding is formed. That can be frustrating for a reader, especially one like me who is less comfortable with what is sometimes labeled "language poetry." Much of this book falls into this category. When I finish something like this, I wish I had a teacher to help guide my reading, to give me some hand holds to find my way through the text.
At other times, I was simply overwhelmed by the beauty, sometimes surprising and sometime anticipated, of Machado's verse. She is most certainly a poet. A few examples, pulled at random:
'In heat my tongue delivers a sermon like a caress.'
'I am thinking now to describe what it's like to touch something.
What it is to rub off on someone.
When two matters interact should I hope to keep my skin.'
'the white of sheep
invades a field
a circle empties
into another circle.'
'One way to see grammar is to think fields, how bare they are until you look underneath. At their limits are nouns to which you run & you pick them up & cannot.'
'The throat is a corset
I wear, I tighten,
from which I exude.
I eat, I speak,
it is sexual. Prep
work, like eros, is
in the minutiae.'
'So wind is a textual experience. So I revel in its ambiguities. So may I stand whole minutes suffering its arrival at the station. So may I in this manner feel felt in the mind of whatever is greater than I. & in the consideration of that is greater than I I become lost in the folds of eros. & in appearing out of this maze I become ready to speak my name in the stations that ask. This is always & everywhere how I am sculpted, baroque & wavering, submitting my shape to some common stipulations.'
*** *** *** ***
At times I felt I was reading the private prayers of someone. At times I wanted them to hold my hand just a bit and guide me.
February 3, 2019
Read this book in the cemetery mostly in 30 degree weather in four top layers and two bottom ones. I had bought two Marlboros for the walk through the park to a friends. One broke in my coat, which I was actually happy about. This book was something else. A celebration and a eulogy through the language of someone that loves language and makes words go lalalala even when they're typically bummers. I want to reread this one again soon. It was so good. My brain feels sloshy good after reading it.
May 23, 2018
An extended lyric constructed out of a dozen sequences of poems, fragments and accumulations. Machado’s lyrics are meditative, expansive and gestural, writing a particular flavour of intimacy blended with abstraction that connects, deeply, as she writes in the poem/section “PROSPECT”: “I am thinking now to describe what it’s like to touch something. / What it is to rub off on someone.”
May 12, 2018
Review forthcoming in Western Humanities Review
March 31, 2026
A dreamy piece of poetry that connects territorial gains and losses to sleep, futuristic possibilities, and the fragmentations inherent in our thinking process. Which one is harder to perfect? Body or mind? Our mind of course. It remains to extend us, locate us and dislocate us in unimaginable ways. Dreams may act as bonding processes, connecting the past and future into indistinguishable layers leading to brief recognition, brief relief, yet in the end leave us yearning.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews