Emporium

In Emporium, Aditi Machado follows a merchant woman as she travels a twenty-first-century “silk route,” trading her wares while becoming “lost” in un-monetizable reciprocities and the sensory excesses of the marketplace: coins changing hands, the odors of food and sweat, the “noise” of translation and multilingualism. Is this tradeswoman in control of her “destiny”/ business or is she the product of impenetrable global forces? These investigative, itinerant poems interrogate our entanglement in the irresistible threads of language, history, and money.