Airea D. Matthews

5 days ago | thebaffler.com | Alina Stefanescu |Niela Orr |Airea D. Matthews |Maura Mahoney

a gender-modified golden shovel of Revelations 17:6And how the pros sparkled! I thought I’d play this game bestwhen playing my betters. Up close to the net, pivotless,I felt myself most alive when being slaughtered. Everyonesaw the shame, how swiftly it came to its descendant. Dark heirsthen cookies in a star tin. I licked the sweetness from each surface. I thought I could handle it. Maybe a teeny tinge evenwondered.

Sep 20, 2023 | adimagazine.com | Airea D. Matthews

Airea D. Matthews’ first collection of poems is the critically acclaimed Simulacra, which received the prestigious 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. The collection explores  longing, desire, and inheritance with power, insight, and intense emotion.

Jul 20, 2023 | harpersbazaar.com | Airea D. Matthews

It was the summer of 1977. Barbara Millicent Roberts wasn’t quite out of her teens when she accompanied my father and me to my first backroom poker game. I was a shy but precocious five-year-old who was along for whatever ride my parents were on. My father was a mess of a charming man who elicited fealty through heavy-handed means or flat-out cheating—“the hustle,” as he called it. For him, there was no higher god than money, and between his joblessness and addictions, that god often fell silent.

May 24, 2023 | simonandschuster.com | Airea D. Matthews

"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.

May 24, 2023 | yalereview.org | Airea D. Matthews

In the great bleak roomthere was a telephone and a big buffoonand a picture of a sheepshooting up the moon and there were three heels of breadasleep on the bedand a half-plunged needle and a flour-coated weeviland past due tollsand attic holesand a storm and a funnel and a windblown tunnel and a bat and a shove and the question of loveand a comb of kinked hair and a frayed wicker chair and the slowed steady crushof all the elders insisting I hushhhhGoodnight, Fog Room. Goodnight, Gibbous Moon.