Goddamn. Matthews has both childhood trauma and academic poetic muscles at intense levels. There’s a poem where a therapist asks the speaker to talk about a moment she didn’t regret and the speaker talks about helping her father shoot heroin once. I would completely understand it if a poet with this extreme of a memory bank to draw from spent their whole lives writing sobbing confessional poems, just trying to bear witness and heal. Matthews manages to do so much more than that. There are erasure poems of economic theory (Adam Smith and Guy Debord) that make the reader consider the ways the speaker’s womanhood, and in turn the trauma the world has given her, has been commodified and the violence therein. While some of the erasure poems aren’t mindblowing, they do an excellent job of teasing out how violent public systems create these intense personal traumas. To read Bread and Circus is to sit with someone who has extraordinary life experience AND has done an incredible amount of work to contextualize and think critically about it. 4 out of 5.