Bread and Circus by Airea D. Matthews
Philadelphia Poet Laureate Airea D. Matthews' new poetry collection is a formally and politically ambitious reckoning with racial poverty in the US
In Airea D. Matthews’ Bread and Circus, poetry is like liquid cement, spilling into gaps and silences, forming itself in solid, textured ridges. Named for the famous Juvenal axiom that sits at the front of the collection – “and every thing, now bridles its desires, and limits its anxious longings to two things only – bread, and the games of the circus!” – Matthews’ remarkably inventive collection stages an inquiry into both the materiality and spectacle of racial violence and poverty that scaffold Black life in the US, crafting a formally and politically ambitious confrontation of literature’s very ability to speak to the thick weight of personal and social history.
This weight takes the form of both Matthews’ own autobiographical recollections – conveyed at times with cool frankness, at others in a frantic rush of enjambment and broken rhythm – and the works of political economist Adam Smith and French Marxist theorist Guy Debord, extracts weaving and piling up desperately through the collection. Plastered across pages, their writing is deftly rearticulated and recontextualised: palimpsests of found poetry that inscribe the forcible impoverishment of Black Americans, long an aesthetic and political lacuna, into the academic archive. In many ways, Bread and Circus demands whether language, itself a tool of power, is capable of articulating the experiences of those it has long quietened. Perhaps not; and so Matthews breaks it apart, reassembles it, and welds it anew.