Bread and Circus, Airea D. Matthews
Bread and Circus, Airea D. Matthews
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Bread and Circus

Author: Airea D. Matthews

Narrator: Airea D. Matthews

Unabridged: 1 hr 48 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 05/30/2023


Synopsis

Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize

“Discerning and significant.” —Poetry Foundation
“A sharp memoir in verse.” —LitHub

This powerful and timely collection of autobiographical poems from Yale Young Poets Award Winner and Philadelphia’s former Poet Laureate Airea D. Matthews about the economics of class is a brilliant intellectual and artistic contribution to the ongoing conversation about American inequality.

As a former student of economics, Airea D. Matthews was fascinated and disturbed by 18th-century Scottish economist Adam Smith’s magnum opus The Wealth of Nations. Now, she presents a direct challenge to Smith’s theory of the invisible hand, which claims self-interest is the key to optimal economic outcomes. By juxtaposing redacted texts by Smith and the French Marxist Guy Debord with autobiographical prose and poems, Bread and Circus personally offers how self-interest fails when it reduces people to commodity and spectacle.

A layered collection to be read and reread, with poems that range from tragic to humorous, in forms as varied and nuanced as the ideas the book considers, Bread and Circus asks what it is to have survived, indeed to have flourished, and at what cost. “Full of humane wisdom, this powerful volume forces readers to acknowledge systemic inequity” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) and is ideal for fans of Elizabeth Alexander, Natalie Diaz, Eve Ewing, and Gregory Pardlo.

About Airea D. Matthews

Airea D. Matthews was Philadelphia’s 2022–2023 poet laureate. Her first collection of poems is the critically acclaimed Simulacra, which won the 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. Her work has appeared in Harper’s Bazaar, Poetry, The New York TimesGulf CoastVQR, Best American PoetsAmerican PoetLitHub, 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 an associate professor and codirector of the creative writing program at Bryn Mawr College.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Kim

Thank you to Scribner and to Goodreads Giveaways for an ARC of this remarkable book of poetry by Airea Dee Matthews, Philadelphia's Poet Laureate. I knew this author had something special when the very first poem was printed within what I thought was a probability graph, where p = probability of suc......more

Goodreads review by Zelda

In meeting with Airea, I asked her how capital relates to hereditary addiction, and her answer was something interesting. She responded by telling me the definition of economy: “The Latin word has its origin at the Ancient Greek's oikonomia or oikonomos. The word's first part oikos means ‘house’, an......more

Goodreads review by Jax

This beautiful book is a collection of poetry that takes aim at Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. Matthews ingeniously inserts faded pages of Adam’s and Marxist Debord’s texts whereon she bolds certain words or letters to create a statement. The poetry is weighty with tragic stories of poverty and......more

Goodreads review by abby

Completely original, this collection of poetry is a scathing criticism of capitalism and its commodification of vulnerable people. Matthews skilfully incorporates Adam Smith’s economic texts alongside the Marxist writings of Guy Debord throughout the collection, picking apart capitalist structures t......more