Bread and Circus

Bread and Circus by Airea D. Matthews is an ardently interactive second collection that explodes and transfigures canonical texts by Adam Smith and Guy Debord to explore capitalism’s impacts beyond the theoretical. The book resists the principles of The Wealth of Nations through erasures that keep the erased text in gray and indicate its implications in black. For example, in “On Real Costs,” “our” appears within “labour” and “souls” in “succeeds to a great fortune, does not necessarily acquire,” making visible supposedly invisible forces.

The poet plays with time, which animated the inventive experimentations of her 2017 debut Simulacra as “that immaculate housekeeper.” “[E]very second is a lesson” in Bread and Circus,which treads a family unit from a 1969 wedding to the father’s illness in 1996; the record reaches violences and humors of the 21st century—tragic deaths in Detroit, online clowns who “eat vegan & have / luxury beef.” But “time is never up in isolation,” related always to capital as the “family couldn’t afford the ’70s until 1989.” The card-playing father in another poem says: “boy, don’t touch the chips; / They’re worth more than you,” addressing a girl as “boy because / he wanted one.”

The private sphere the girl remembers—her mother’s nurturing arm broken by her father—is far from her domestic life as an adult, empathetically watching her family learn of the 2013 George Zimmerman verdict in “Animalia Repeating.” She calms one crying son in the bathroom: “he wondered, ‘Why do they hate me?’ I suggested there was no they.” Laws of consumption, possession, and production define public space, where her Black children must brace for life-threatening surveillance. The speaker’s own attempts to void such surveillance include buying an expensive hazmat suit to prove her worth to the vintage store clerk following her. When “white boys” yell the n-word out of a truck, she redefines it in bodily terms—“an acrobat, a word with double joints”—to her four-year-old daughter.

Body and mind are commercialized through marriage, eviction, debt, and also through savior complexes or headlining tragedy. This discerning and significant collection presents a tender resistance to commodification by straight lines (“Indecisive. Afraid”), controlled images (“copious selfies”), and colonial stories (“tidy myths”).