Bread and Circus

By: Airea D. Matthews

Narrated by: Airea D. Matthews

Beautifully and gently read by the author, Airea D. Matthews.

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.

©2023 Airea D. Matthews (P)2023 Macmillan Publishers International Limited

Critic reviews

'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 )

'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 Abdurraqip, 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.' (Linda Gregerson, author of Canopy )