AudioFile - JULY 2023
Airea D. Matthews, winner of the 2016 Yale Younger Poets Prize, is a fine poet with a command of poetic and speaking voices that serves her well in this audiobook. Her poems tell stories of some parts of her life, including how she has shifted among different American cultures. She uses accents and changes in timbre to portray the various characters she has encountered--or, sometimes, embodied. All the personas she takes on are Black, but many of the problems are those of anyone living in contemporary America. The book also directly challenges Adam Smith's WEALTH OF NATIONS, with direct quotations used as epigraphs and in the text. There is some additional voice work by her brothers, Emery and Wes. D.M.H. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine
Publishers Weekly
★ 05/22/2023
The unflinching second collection from Matthews (Simulacra) interweaves autobiographical poems with erasures of texts by Adam Smith, the father of free-market economics, and Guy Debord, a Marxist social theorist, to create a vigorous and personal refutation of late-stage capitalism. These pieces question the limits of choice and opportunity for those on the margins, positioning Matthews’s lived experience as a Black woman from a working-class family in relation to Smith’s ideas about economic self-interest and Debord’s reduction of human lives to commodities. Confessional poems capture the emotional calculus family members must make under economic strain, such as the father who loses his job one night and stops at a bar to consider his options: “to pilfer time through a bottle/ then plot provision—/ three square, four souls—/ strategizing who to feed/ to whom.” Other entries situate family trauma within a wider economic context: “in 1979 after OPEC raised the price of oil/ my father rolled up the hem of his pants and handed me a needle... and i had a choice/ shoot him up or suffer worse.” Full of humane wisdom, this powerful volume forces readers to acknowledge systemic inequity. (May)
From the Publisher
Winner of the LA Times Book Prize
"The reigning Poet Laureate of Philadelphia packs heart and humor into this collection of autobiographical poems while taking a scalpel to the idea of a benevolent free market."—Philadelphia Magazine
“This discerning and significant collection presents a tender resistance to commodification by straight lines ('Indecisive. Afraid'), controlled images ('copious selfies'), and colonial stories ('tidy myths').”—PoetryFoundation.org
“A vigorous and personal refutation of late-stage capitalism...Full of humane wisdom, this powerful volume forces readers to acknowledge systemic inequity."—Publisher's Weekly (starred review)
"In her stunning collection Bread and Circus, Airea Matthews uses a bricolage of citations and erasure to reflect on the epigenetic costs of Black dispossession in a country founded on self-interest. Bread and Circus is an authentic journey of enduring love and witness. It is sonorous, erudite, raw—and one that will stay with me always."—Cathy Park Hong, author of Minor Feelings
"When sinking into the work of Airea Matthews within Bread and Circus, 'gratitude,' is the word that most eagerly leaps to mind. I am grateful to be witness to a writer dismantling the boundaries of form, shape, and language, while not sacrificing any brilliance on the page. This is a stunning collection of work, which feels both ahead of its time and also abundantly on time."—Hanif Abdurraqib, author of The Little Devil in America
"From page to unrelenting page in this fierce and brilliant book, Airea Matthews shows us just how high the stakes of poetry should be. If you are not writing to save your life, you are not writing in Airea Matthews’ league. That simple. Her vision is encompassing: what are the systems that subordinate us to their own perpetuation? Her vision is intimate: where, then, are our opportunities for grace? If these beautiful poems are to be believed, that grace is to be found, or rather forged, against all odds, at every turning. That is the scale of the achievement here."—Linda Gregerson, author of Canopy
"Like all crowning collections in an oeuvre, this book enacts, with tenderness and intelligence, an erudition that matches the capacious love of its ambitions. Formally ambidextrous, teethed with wit and uncompromising dignity, Matthews engages the archive as a breathing document, refusing to let history be done with itself, and thereby accomplishes what I love most about poetry—especially hers—that it lives, is living."—Ocean Vuong, author of Time is a Mother
"Roman poet Juvenal criticized a public distracted with free wheat and mindless entertainment. Toni Morrison said the point of racism is to keep us distracted from fully living our lives. With the genius and ferocity of mother love, Airea Matthews’s Bread and Circus shreds our expectations of what poems can be and do while clearing the air of the illusions that cloud our understanding of past, present, self and other. Lift the cover and breathe in the clarity concentrated on these pages."—Gregory Pardlo, author of Digest
July 2023 - AudioFile
Airea D. Matthews, winner of the 2016 Yale Younger Poets Prize, is a fine poet with a command of poetic and speaking voices that serves her well in this audiobook. Her poems tell stories of some parts of her life, including how she has shifted among different American cultures. She uses accents and changes in timbre to portray the various characters she has encountered--or, sometimes, embodied. All the personas she takes on are Black, but many of the problems are those of anyone living in contemporary America. The book also directly challenges Adam Smith's WEALTH OF NATIONS, with direct quotations used as epigraphs and in the text. There is some additional voice work by her brothers, Emery and Wes. D.M.H. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine
