Bread and Circus

Airea D. Matthews

Sep 2023 · Picador

About this ebook

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 the author’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.

About the author

Airea D. Matthews is Philadelphia’s current poet laureate. Her first collection of poems, the critically acclaimed Simulacra, won the 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Gulf Coast, VQR, Best American Poets, American Poet, LitHub, Harvard Review, and elsewhere. Matthews holds a BA in economics from the University of Pennsylvania as well as an MFA from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program and an MPA from the Gerald Ford School of Public Policy, both at the University of Michigan. A Pew fellow, she is a professor and directs the poetry program at Bryn Mawr College.