Some Beheadings

by Aditi Machado

Overview

In Some Beheadings, winner of The Believer Poetry Award, the “beheaded” poet asks, “What does thinking feel like,” as she displaces her mind into landscape, exploring territories as disparate as India’s Western Ghats and the cinematic Mojave Desert, and as absurd as insomnia and dream. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781643620671
Publisher:	Nightboat Books
Publication date:	10/07/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	112
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

ADITI MACHADO is an Indian poet. Previous works include Route: Marienbad and her translation of Farid Tali’s Prosopopoeia. She is a PhD candidate in creative writing at the University of Denver.

Table of Contents

Prospekt 1

Route: Thicket 25

In tWeeds 39

Route: Western Ghats 43

Speeches, Minor 49

Route: Desert 55

Blessed Is 67

Route: Marienbad 73

Prospect 87

Torso 91

Archaic 95

If Thought Is 97

Notes 103

Acknowledgements 104

What People are Saying About This

Srikanth Reddy

“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. Tracing migratory routes through the thickets and deserts of signification—from the Western Ghats to Marienbad and beyond—Machado arrives at something like a spiritual allegory for the disenchanted. “Grace not of but as / god,” is the subject of her post-universal grammar, “that unusable concept / used in excess.” The grace of such work opens new prospects—or prospekts?—onto identity’s imperium: “& I is an orient in the sense that all things wend toward me.” Yet the spectre of sovereignty, in Machado’s literary imagination, remains ever haunted by its own linguistic predication. “I have lived,” observes this incomparable elegist of belonging, “is a way of saying something ceased.”

Mary Jo Bang

“To attempt to deconstruct these poems would be to blow them apart. They are utterly contemporary. They are deeply intimate. They are the lashes of a forest of thought.”

Editorial Reviews

★ 09/18/2017
Machado’s steadfast and rigorous debut exists at the intersection of language and place, where thinking takes the shape of a tree or a thicket of “florid logic” that grows and branches in multiple directions at once. “I describe my day to myself as if I were perambulating through infinite foliage,” she writes. The images take readers across time and space: to fields dotted with grazing ruminants; deserts whose “labial dunes” double as runes; and, in an oblique reference to the film Last Year at Marienbad, a Marienbad where a “single baroque animal/ opens a pomegranate” and “ancient civilizations spill out as red beads.” Though the focus of the text meanders, the first-person perspective offers a sense of immediacy; in other words, however disembodied the thinking, and however omnidirectional the thought, the speaker grounds ideas with notions of physicality: “Can you wake up/ from a sentence like/ you wake up on the porch?” Machado’s luscious descriptions—themselves “a mild decadence, an explicit/ industry as that of bees”—exude a palpable strangeness, and the speaker welcomes constant change and movement without requiring a resolution. The result is a labyrinthine sensorium where thinking about thinking generates ever more pleasures. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

Machado’s steadfast and rigorous debut exists at the intersection of language and place, where thinking takes the shape of a tree or a thicket of “florid logic” that grows and branches in multiple directions at once. “I describe my day to myself as if I were perambulating through infinite foliage,” she writes. The images take readers across time and space: to fields dotted with grazing ruminants; deserts whose “labial dunes” double as runes; and, in an oblique reference to the film Last Year at Marienbad, a Marienbad where a “single baroque animal/ opens a pomegranate” and “ancient civilizations spill out as red beads.” Though the focus of the text meanders, the first-person perspective offers a sense of immediacy; in other words, however disembodied the thinking, and however omnidirectional the thought, the speaker grounds ideas with notions of physicality: “Can you wake up/ from a sentence like/ you wake up on the porch?” Machado’s luscious descriptions—themselves “a mild decadence, an explicit/ industry as that of bees”—exude a palpable strangeness, and the speaker welcomes constant change and movement without requiring a resolution. The result is a labyrinthine sensorium where thinking about thinking generates ever more pleasures. (Oct.)—Publisher's Weekly

From the Publisher