A stunning debut collection that examines the geophilosophy of lyric poetry

Here the ¿beheaded¿ poet displaces her mind into the landscape, exploring territories as disparate as India¿s Western Ghats and the cinematic Mojave Desert, as absurd as insomnia and dream. Some Beheadings asks three questions: ¿How does thinking happen?¿ ¿What does thinking feel like?¿ ¿How do I think about the future?¿ The second question takes primacy over the others, reflecting on what poets and critics have called ¿the sensuous intellect,¿ what needs to be felt in language, the contours of questions touched in sound and syntax.

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