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.