Bread and Circus
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The unflinching second collection from Matthews (Simulacra) interweaves autobiographical poems with erasures of texts by Adam Smith, the father of free-market economics, and Guy Debord, a Marxist social theorist, to create a vigorous and personal refutation of late-stage capitalism. These pieces question the limits of choice and opportunity for those on the margins, positioning Matthews's lived experience as a Black woman from a working-class family in relation to Smith's ideas about economic self-interest and Debord's reduction of human lives to commodities. Confessional poems capture the emotional calculus family members must make under economic strain, such as the father who loses his job one night and stops at a bar to consider his options: "to pilfer time through a bottle/ then plot provision—/ three square, four souls—/ strategizing who to feed/ to whom." Other entries situate family trauma within a wider economic context: "in 1979 after OPEC raised the price of oil/ my father rolled up the hem of his pants and handed me a needle... and i had a choice/ shoot him up or suffer worse." Full of humane wisdom, this powerful volume forces readers to acknowledge systemic inequity.
