Bread and Circus
Airea D. Matthews
08 June 2023
9781035000821Synopsis
Formally ambidextrous, teethed with wit and uncompromising dignity." – Ocean Vuong
Bread and Circus is a hybrid and palimpsestic memoir-in-verse: it combines poetry, photography and spectral imaging to explore the realities of economic necessity and marginal poverty through a personal lens.
Examining the experience of the US urban Black community from a variety of perspectives, it draws heavily on Airea D. Matthews's archival research on Adam Smith, the eighteenth-century Scottish economist, as well as his magnum opus, The Wealth of Nations.
As the perspective shifts from watchful child, to teacher, mother, writer and citizen, Bread and Circus asks what it is to have survived, indeed to have flourished, and at what cost.
'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 On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
'Matthews's writing is bold, innovative and complex.'Washington Post
'Matthews is virtuosic, frantic, and darkly, very darkly, funny.'New Yorker
