Material Witness

November 18, 2024
The world of matter and words entwine in this rich and demanding collection from Machado (Emporium). The poet considers the “kinetic enchantments” of the weather (“Material Witness”), gardens (“Feeling Transcripts from the Outpost”), and multicourse dinners (“Concerning Matters Culinary”). The title poem announces the book’s dominant style and preoccupations; in lines that do not lend themselves to immediate comprehension (“Coats fly open and blood boats./ The weather reports itself to a dead vertical left”), the borders between the physical and the spiritual, the material and the verbal, are blurred. Having dinner, the speaker feels their thoughts “INFUSING THE FOOD// INSTEAD OF THE OTHER/ WAY AROUND” and later considers how “where you co-sleep with grasses, the air balsamic/ an entropic transcript patterned on songs beyond/ your kind, it is thetic & encrypted.” Throughout, Machado displays an exuberant freedom in choosing the rare word (“anfractuous”; “degust”) and the obscure image (a “radical in your gut... measured the foreclosure of history”). She works in a pointedly anti-lyrical and anti-confessional mode, disdaining “those final years in which lyric was put before all” in favor of “an opaque zone.” Readers up for a challenge will be rewarded.