The properties of artificial materials can be tailored to exhibit extraordinary properties by cleverly engineering their composition. The development of such metamaterials is a prominent thrust in engineering today. One of the greatest challenges is to engineer metamaterials that manipulate waves by design. Of particular interest are elastic waves, since numerous mechanical applications require their control; vibration isolation, ultrasonography, energy harvesting and cloaking, to name a few. The forefront of research in wave control emerged from a seemingly unrelated theory, quantum mechanics, with the development of its non-Hermitian formalism, describing nonconservative systems that exchange energy with their environment. By drawing analogies between this formalism and those of classical systems, researchers have discovered phenomena that defy intuition, phenomena such as zero reflection and chiral absorption, and have exploited them to control light, sound, and elastic waves. This project goes beyond these analogies by exploiting the rich nature of elastodynamics, a nature that is unparalleled in other physics, in order to access unexplored non-Hermitian features and harness them for unprecedented wave control.