A powerful collection of autobiographical poems from Yale Young
Poets Award Winner and Philadelphia’s Poet Laureate Airea D.
Matthews about the economics of class and its failures for those
rendered invisible by it.
As a former student of economics, Airea D. Matthews was fascinated
and disturbed by 18th-century Scottish economist Adam Smith, and his
magnum opus The Wealth of Nations. Bread and Circus is 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
demonstrates that self-interest fails when people become commodities
themselves, and shows how the most vulnerable—including the author
and her family—have been impacted by that failure. 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 explores the area where theory and
reality meet.
Timely, ambitious, and relevant, Bread and Circus is a
brilliant intellectual and artistic contribution to an ongoing
conversation about American inequality, for fans of Elizabeth
Alexander, Natalie Diaz, Eve Ewing, and Gregory Pardlo.