Matthews, Airea D.: Bread and Circus

Scribner, hardcoverPublication Date: May 30, 2023Publisher Marketing: 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 t