words toward Aditi Machado’s ‘Material Witness’, Nightboat Books 2024

Material Witness
poems, Aditi Machado
Nightboat Books 2024

I saw a path back there and miss being able to take things. All at once I am reading Aditi Machado’s Material Witness. What a moveable withstanding. Continue, time. Language says cheers when it has a word for endangered excess. Cheers to language y’all. Machado is a chemist in love with wind. A poet of distance who can hear the telescope’s hunger. The kids were kids and their bodies, prose. This is a rescue mission. A giddily embedded work of our paused and overrepresented rebellions. Of the underthrown mundane. There is something human going on here that’s learning to exist. Machado casts speaking as the deepest silence needed to de-narrate presence. Mad comet. Disciplined radar. Last recipe of the observed. There are hands in the back of my hands and I stand beneath this clock of saying. Weariness fakes its own sleep study. Speculation stages its own abandonment. Witness outsells absence with homemade samples of invisibility. I don’t know what hope is. A thing, with. 

~

reflection by Barton Smock