The Ancestors School a Basic Bitch
We're saying we're exhaustedby you. Coveting the smallest sliverof attention just so you might feelrequisite a little while longer,a little more desirable to nobodies.Bodies don't even matter. Do youlisten to the signs we send—beetles in the crux of storm, straypussies meowing you home, Junebed defiled by mice? And youfancy yourself a goddess for no earthlyreason. Think of how fiercely Persephoneunyoked March from May. Recall Inannahad enough sense to visit Hell and notreminisce the landscape.
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- September 2, 2023
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“The Ancestors School a Basic Bitch” from BREAD AND CIRCUS: by Airea D. Matthews.
Published by Scribner on May 30, 2023.
Copyright © 2023 by Airea D. Matthews.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Airea D. Matthews is Philadelphia’s current poet laureate. Her first collection of poems is the critically acclaimed Simulacra, which won the 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Gulf Coast, VQR, Best American Poets, American Poet, LitHub, Harvard Review, and elsewhere. Matthews holds a BA in economics from the University of Pennsylvania as well as an MFA from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program and an MPA from the Gerald Ford School of Public Policy, both at the University of Michigan. A Pew fellow, she is a professor and directs the poetry program at Bryn Mawr College.
"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
“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').”
—Poetry Foundation
“A vigorous and personal refutation of late-stage capitalism…Full of humane wisdom, this powerful volume forces readers to acknowledge systemic inequity."
—Publisher's Weekly (starred review)
"In her stunning collection Bread and Circus, Airea Matthews uses a bricolage of citations and erasure to reflect on the epigenetic costs of Black dispossession in a country founded on self-interest. Bread and Circus is an authentic journey of enduring love and witness. It is sonorous, erudite, raw—and one that will stay with me always."
—Cathy Park Hong, author of Minor Feelings
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