“Meaning you discovered you were sovereign,” declares the first and titular poem of Material Witness (Nightboat Books, 2024), and from this kernel of contradiction, Aditi Machado’s poetic project begins to unfurl across the pages of the collection. Your sovereignty (or at least your belief therein) assured to you by an obscure narrator, that elusive first person who hides beneath the surface of the second-person poem and on whom your very being in the poem relies. Machado’s is a poetics in which sovereignty—the authority of the body over itself, which assumes a single and stable concept of the body “itself”—dissolves as soon as it is constituted. Bodies fall apart, interpenetrate, transform, and reconstitute: the flesh melts into the vegetable, night “slit[s] your mineral bosom,” a “radical in your gut… measure[s] the foreclosure of history,” and you are always “in the middle of the thing.” Doubt creeps in—“Could it be you were divided into a body politic?”—and we realize soon enough that there is no sovereignty here.

 

The loss of the sovereign body—a concept borrowed, not coincidentally, from the language of political theory—underpins the ecological workings of Material Witness, a collection which seeks a new relation to earth systems in form as well as in content. This is no mere tree-ekphrasis, but poetry as biochemical process, mapping out the complex exchanges between organisms, climates, human activity, and language itself. In her book The Floating Coast, environmental historian Bathsheba Demuth defines an ecosystem as “the aggregate of many species’ habits of transformation, their ways of moving energy from its origin in the sun across space and condensing it over time. To be alive,” she writes, “is to take a place in a chain of conversions.” A “chain of conversions” is an apt description for Machado’s state of perpetual poetic motion, a strange and shifting syntax where image blurs into image, where ordinary nouns perform improbable verbs, where energy changes form but never dissipates. “The period accelerating / into the eye like a gelatin / bullet, like surrogate / glitter, shreds of intensity / like light against needles / of the eastern hemlock.”  In  these lines from “What Use” the ecological “chain of conversions” is formalized as a chain of similes. The “like” works as conversion engine: facilitating the transition of poetic energy from one object to the next, linking them in consubstantiality while simultaneously preserving their non-identity. Meanwhile, each object is already something else, somehow non-identical with itself: the bullet made of gelatin, the glitter “surrogate,” the whole thing always light (that bearer of energy, paradoxical wave/particle, entering eyes and moving through leaves, making possible both the perception and perpetuation of life).

 

At the same time, Material Witness is highly conscious of itself as a non-sovereign object situated within a vast ecosystem of texts, never quite fully itself. The collection’s reflexive embrace of the interchange of nutrients between itself and its “environment” manifests in its unabashed density of reference, both to contemporary poets (credited by Machado in the end notes) and to the dead—the latter foregrounding what Tobias Menely calls the “stratigraphic” aspect of the text; no poem purely of its moment but always “sedimented and fissured, crisscrossed by fault lines and strata, subject to processes of accretion and erosion, volatility and hardening.” In her playful allusions to “what then was called the universal,” her occasional “O”s and “thou”s, Coleridgean winds and Whitmanesque grasses, Machado nods to the Romantics and Transcendentalists, those proto-environmentalists of the nineteenth century whose passion for the natural world as the expression of metaphysical oneness still colors our contemporary environmentalisms and the very concept of “nature” itself. Though there is something slightly embarrassing about these fossil philosophies—“you laughed” at “ancient texts” from the “heyday of psychology”—Material Witness recognizes that “eject them, you cannot,” and the result is a text rich with the accumulation of time, where the dead are never so decomposed as to leave us unhaunted. Poetry that, like the land, remembers.

 

But if the poetic speaker’s declaration in “Feeling Transcripts From The Outpost” that “What they elect, / I supplant in private / and orphic degradation. / The garden affronts luxury / as it does moderation” smacks not a little of Thoreau’s famous retreat from civilization to “live deliberately” at Walden Pond, Material Witness eschews the harsh nature/culture dualism of Transcendentally-inclined environmentalisms, foregrounding instead the co-constitution of the natural and the social. The convergence, facilitated by the occluded hand of the trade route, of climate, organic object, cultural meaning, historical event, and built environment at the everyday junction of the meal forms the subject of “Concerning Matters Culinary” (a title taken, per the author, from a first-century Roman text by Apicius, considered the oldest surviving cookbook in the world). “TWO ELEMENTS,” reads one of its brief “recipes.” “THE TRIFLING BEEF / SET UPON / A CAULIFLOWER PUREE / THE INEFFABLE CURRY LEAF / INFUSING IT / REFUSES THIS / APPROPRIATION.” Here, food is not just aliment but actor, moved by and moving through history, the curry leaf actively resisting co-optation by a colonial culinary tradition while at the same time “infusing” it. Each meal—or, more accurately, each idea of a meal—is a microcosm of the world Machado creates, where the historical, the political, and the organic co-conspire to produce a strange, entangled object-world which often seems to have a life of its own.

 

And yet the speaker of “Concerning Matters Culinary” is left with “THE PECULIAR FEELING / MY THOUGHTS WERE / INFUSING THE FOOD / INSTEAD OF THE OTHER / WAY AROUND.” Fascinated though it is by the movements of things objective and external, Material Witness must grapple as well with the problem of the subject: the internality by which externality is born, the stubbornly human perspective by which we must grasp the inhuman world. The invocation of the subject as “witness” suggests a person uninvolved in the action—merely standing nearby, observing—but the situation of Machado’s “material witness” turns out to be a more complicated one. In legal terms, a “material witness” is “a person whose testimony is material to a criminal proceeding,” and by law such a person can be arrested. By the apparently passive act of mere looking, this witness finds themselves implicated in the proceedings, their subjective knowledge made “material” and their body made vulnerable to seizure. “I THOUGHT,” says the speaker, “I WAS WITNESS / TO SOMETHING / WITHIN ME / WHEN THE PLATTER / ARRIVED.” The necessary distance of the witness here marks a division and an objectification of the self; at the same time, it extends the self, drawing the object (the meal not yet eaten) into the gravitational sphere of the subject. The point is not only that the subject and the object are interrelated or mutually dependent—this is obvious enough—but that the subject-as-witness experiences a dizzying doubt at the very delineation of self and “environment”; that to witness the world is to witness oneself and vice versa. Here, the perpetual dilemma of the poet-ecologist, who wishes to bear witness to a world of which they cannot but take part, who goes looking for the wild and finds only themselves.

 

The problem of locating the poetic subject in an objective environment is by no means a new one; Meneley argues that lyricism—the channeling of poetic energy through a single psychological viewpoint—emerged over two centuries years ago “in the narrator’s experience of a rupture between past and present registered in atmospheric change,” as a mechanism for situating the poet and the poem amidst the bewilderment of a shifting climate. For Material Witness, though, the time of the lyric is past; it looks over its shoulder at “those final years / in which lyric was put before all, lyric tea, lyric grant, lyric mass shooter.” “Bent Record,” the one properly lyric poem in the collection, demonstrates the shortcomings of the form even as it inhabits them. The “I” of “Bent Record” admits to a whole string of actions, ranging from the neutral to the nonsensical to the overtly criminal: “It was I who circulated / the yellow memo and I who poisoned the well.” “I darkened the web and I defrauded the / publican and on stormy nights I withheld from classification / those very secrets which pierce the hearts of young historians.” And yet, in the end, the not-entirely-contrite narrator only confesses to being human, to “liv[ing] in intricacies of the obvious,” to “[doing] only some of what I could do to secure my freedom.” Like all of us, she sometimes allows individual impulses to outweigh planetary imperatives; let he who has not “[ridden] my bad scooter which killed the coral reef” cast the first stone. It is a confession which has meant nothing; we will find neither satisfaction nor salvation in the individual testimony of the lyric but only, always, the unsatisfying partial truths that neither condemn nor exonerate us.

 

Luckily, Material Witness proves itself able to imagine a different kind of living and a different poetic form, one that entails embracing indeterminacy, transformation, and interchange, acknowledging “at the borders of the systems always something a little bit extra.” In our inescapable and paradoxical relationship to the material world, in our inherent imbrication in the material and the impossibility of looking on as an innocent witness, perhaps we may find power alongside despair. “Vacuous sorrow,” Machado tells us in “NOW,” the final poem in the collection, “you must defeat.” It is, after all, the constant conversion of energy, the transgression of sovereignties and the flow of one thing into the next, which keeps us from the stagnation that means death. Perhaps the perilous situation of the material witness, struggling to look clearly upon a world from which she cannot find the adequate distance, is not only a dilemma but also an invitation, the conditions of possibility for a kind of work (poetic or otherwise) which will radically transform both self and environment. “You till the soil, you interlope, the worm / in your arm breathes, it is the green vein of life / returning to its central location / your hand in the earth grows more.”