In Emporium, Aditi Machado investigates transnationalism and translation in poems that follow a merchant woman as she travels a twenty-first century “silk route.” As on the original silk route, this merchant is engaged in economic transactions but also cultural exchanges, un-monetizeable reciprocities, the sensory excesses of the marketplace: coins moving from hand to hand, the smell of food and sweat infusing the air, the “noise” of translation and multilingualism. Is this tradeswoman in control of her “destiny”/business or is she a commodity of impenetrable global forces? Her investigative, digressive travel seems a way to interrogate history and money and her own entanglement in such irresistible threads.
