A review by kleonard
Bread and Circus by Airea Dee Matthews, Airea Dee Matthews

3.0

There is some truly excellent poetry in this volume, poetry that is personal and moving and expressive. There's a lot of erasure poetry using texts related to capitalism and finance and regulation that sometimes worked and other times was too poorly formatted for Kindle to be read as it should be. My primary criticism of the collection is that there is too much in it, and that it's not well-organized or very cohesive. Abrupt jumps from topic to topic or from one method to another can be great, and might have worked well here, but the poems seem haphazardly ordered, and even though Matthews presents strong pieces throughout the book, it's hard to understand why they've been placed they way they are, and what meaning, if any, readers should take from that. The over-stuffed-ness of the collection hurts it some too, as there are weaker poems included that don't do the author any favors. A tighter, leaner collection of the most successful, hardest-hitting poems would have served Matthews better.