Emporium

Aditi Machado is a poet and translator. Her debut collection Some Beheadings received the Believer Poetry Award and her second book Emporium, won the James Laughlin Award. Her writing appears in journals like Lana Turner, The Rumpus, Western Humanities Review, The Chicago Review, and Jacket2 as well as in chapbook form. She works as the Visiting Poet-in-Residence at Washington University in Saint Louis.

"Winner of the James Laughlin Award, the expansive collection from Machado (Some Beheadings) is both luxurious and cerebral, funneling her debut’s torqued syntax into a fever dream of 'the silk route upon which I came.' … This delightful book is full of depth and discovery."—Starred Review in Publishers Weekly"In this gorgeously rendered work from Machado (Some Beheadings), the speaker travels a reimagined contemporary silk route, suffused with a sense of unbelonging ('I came low like low things…barter[ing] my socialisms for some mastic or gâteau'), and arrives at the rich temptations of a vast emporium…VERDICT: A Laughlin Award winner; ­stunning work for sophisticated readers."—Starred Review in Library Journal"“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."—Elisa Gabbert, The New York Times"Aditi Machado’s first book is as breathtaking as it is refreshing. The poet sustains a gentle, rigorous honesty that feels entirely holy."—Believer Poetry Award"A thickly-textured, richly-sensed collection, Emporium is porous and deft, as aware of the limits of the self and language as it is the potential to be alive and awake to the physical world and the powers pulsating through it."—EcoTheo Review"Machado weaves together the financial, social and political in this poetic traipse through the market. She encourages us to meditate on our own livelihood and purchasing patterns, to think about what truly benefits us in our survival. These poems ask deep questions rooted in worth—what is comfort worth, what is money worth? What is monetizable, and what should or should not be? Where are our coins, and our happiness, going when we buy something? Whatever answers we find have both individual and global importance."—Vagabond City"Machado’s sensuous intelligence is richly complex and always grounded in the everyday of things, in seeing and in touch. And with her cadenced fugal voice, she speaks to the troubles of our time… Machado works a magic of sound and sense, reveling in things and revealing all the ideas they incorporate."—Kenyon Review"Emporium is a key contribution to an emerging phenomenon in contemporary poetics—the development of what I am calling a silk poetics. If this phenomenon is small in scale, it nonetheless encompasses some of the most vibrant developments in recent poetry—and its very smallness suggests a shift in the dynamics of avant-garde work, indeed, of poetic innovation."—The Georgia Review"Again, Machado leaves me thinking about the possibilities of language and a translator’s genius brain, the folds of the 'royal mantle.' What I’m trying to say is that Aditi Machado is a genius! I consistently feel challenged by her work. Winner of the 2019 James Laughlin Award, Machado’s Emporium is a sustaining book of rhythmic, unwavering poems, sharp-eyed in her interpretations of silk, gender, and purity, discerning in her understanding of the strangeness of language.—Tarpaulin Sky"As an artist you have to be very lucky or very gifted to create anything so compellingly amiss. If you can do it three times, you are more than lucky. Machado’s is a career to follow."—Lana Turner Journal"Machado refuses the impositions or conventions of how we understand narratives… The intention then is not to end in the way we understand endings, but to keep it open-ended, so that we may grapple with what an ending is. And in this grappling, Machado and her madwoman merchant want to “watch [our] interior grow.” What could be more intellectually invigorating than this?"—Carousel Magazine"Seasoned with multi-lingual knowledge, served with love and profound empathy, Emporium is a delicious, honest, and congenial offering, the likes of which one rarely encounters."—RHINO Poetry"Hers is an expansive lyric, one that exists as a sequence of sections broken into postcard collage, lyric fragment, prose exploration, billboard phrases and doctor’s notes…Emporium is a story told through the collage, the accumulation-collage of fragments, lyrics and prose-structures, one with not even a narrative centre or even the character of the merchant woman, but a seeking, searching, lyric heart."—rob mclennan"Dear Aditi, I did receive 'Route Marienbad.' Read it. Had the feeling I was discovering a real poet. A wonderful feeling. I hope you keep this 'innocence,' this directness, this genuineness. Bonne chance."—Etel Adnan