Material Witness
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- ¥1,700
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- ¥1,700
発行者による作品情報
A series of meditative long poems that ritualize perception as a way of maintaining kinship with the non-human world.
In Material Witness, the poet as human subject keeps vigil over the material world as the quotidian unfolds. The line between observer and observed blurs as non-human agency reveals itself, its own kind of witnessing. In her long poem “Concerning Matters Culinary” inspired by the first Latin cookbook, Machado activates the living matter of gustatory life with wry humor and subtle critique. Encouraging us to eschew nostalgia for deep presence, Machado’s poems remind us that “experience is phenomenal in its segues.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
