Simulacra

Winner of the 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets prize

A fresh and rebellious poetic voice, Airea D. Matthews debuts in the acclaimed series that showcases the work of exciting and innovative young American poets. Matthews’s superb collection explores the topic of want and desire with power, insight, and intense emotion. Her poems cross historical boundaries and speak emphatically from a racialized America, where the trajectories of joy and exploitation, striving and thwarting, violence and celebration are constrained by differentials of privilege and contemporary modes of communication. In his foreword, series judge Carl Phillips calls this book “rollicking, destabilizing, at once intellectually sly and piercing and finally poignant.” This is poetry that breaks new literary ground, inspiring readers to think differently about what poems can and should do in a new media society where imaginations are laid bare and there is no thought too provocative to send out into the world.

"[A] deft, shape-shifting debut.... Matthews surveys the possible responses to what seems ineluctable, offering a work of intrepid imagination, inquiry, and strength." Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Matthews is virtuosic, frantic, and darkly, very darkly, funny." Dan Chiasson, New Yorker

"Matthews’s writing is bold, innovative and complex." Washington Post

"There’s manic, witty energy throughout and delight in the play of form and language." Library Journal

Airea D. Matthews was awarded a 2016 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. Matthews’s poems have appeared in Best American Poetry 2015, American Poet, Four Way Review, The Missouri Review, The Baffler, and elsewhere. She lives and writes in Detroit.