Bread and Circus
“The reigning poet laureate of Philadelphia packs heart and humor into this collection of autobiographical poems while taking a scalpel to the idea of a benevolent free market."
Philadelphia Magazine
Winner of the 2024 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry
A powerful collection of autobiographical poems from Yale Young Poets Award Winner and Philadelphia’s poet laureate 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 eighteenth–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, this book explores the area in which theory and reality meet.
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.
Praise