The perfect last-minute gift Shop credit bundles
Bookseller pick
Bread and Circus by Airea D. Matthews
  Send as gift   Add to Wish List

Almost ready!

In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.

      Log in       Create account
Illustration of person opening a gift

The perfect last-minute gift

Audiobook credit bundles can be delivered instantly, given worldwide, and support local bookstores!

Start gifting
Phone showing make the switch message

Limited-time offer

Get two free audiobooks!

Now’s a great time to shop indie. When you start a new one credit per month membership supporting local bookstores with promo code SWITCH, we’ll give you two bonus audiobook credits at sign-up.

Sign up today

Bread and Circus

$10.49

Narrator Airea D. Matthews

This audiobook uses AI narration.

We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.

Learn more
Length 1 hour 47 minutes
Language English
  Send as gift   Add to Wish List

Almost ready!

In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.

      Log in       Create account

Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize

“Discerning and significant.” —Poetry Foundation
“A sharp memoir in verse.” —LitHub

This powerful and timely collection of autobiographical poems from Yale Young Poets Award Winner and Philadelphia’s former Poet Laureate Airea D. Matthews about the economics of class is a brilliant intellectual and artistic contribution to the ongoing conversation about American inequality.

As a former student of economics, Airea D. Matthews was fascinated and disturbed by 18th-century Scottish economist Adam Smith’s magnum opus The Wealth of Nations. Now, she presents 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 personally offers how self-interest fails when it reduces people to commodity and spectacle.

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, Bread and Circus asks what it is to have survived, indeed to have flourished, and at what cost. “Full of humane wisdom, this powerful volume forces readers to acknowledge systemic inequity” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) and is ideal for fans of Elizabeth Alexander, Natalie Diaz, Eve Ewing, and Gregory Pardlo.

Airea D. Matthews was Philadelphia’s 2022–2023 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 Harper’s Bazaar, Poetry, The New York TimesGulf CoastVQR, Best American PoetsAmerican PoetLitHub, 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 an associate professor and codirector of the creative writing program at Bryn Mawr College.

Airea D. Matthews was Philadelphia’s 2022–2023 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 Harper’s Bazaar, Poetry, The New York TimesGulf CoastVQR, Best American PoetsAmerican PoetLitHub, 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 an associate professor and codirector of the creative writing program at Bryn Mawr College.

Featured in these playlists...

Audiobook details

Narrator:
Airea D. Matthews

ISBN:
9781797164786

Length:
1 hour 47 minutes

Language:
English

Publisher:
Simon & Schuster Audio

Publication date:

Edition:
Unabridged

Libro.fm rank:
#41,117 Overall

Genre rank:
#249 in Poetry

Illustration of person opening a gift

The perfect last-minute gift

Audiobook credit bundles can be delivered instantly, given worldwide, and support local bookstores!

Start gifting
Phone showing make the switch message

Limited-time offer

Get two free audiobooks!

Now’s a great time to shop indie. When you start a new one credit per month membership supporting local bookstores with promo code SWITCH, we’ll give you two bonus audiobook credits at sign-up.

Sign up today
The perfect last-minute gift Shop credit bundles