Airea D. Matthews – Michigan Quarterly Review

Airea D. Matthews

AIREA D. MATTHEWS is the author of Simulacra, winner of the 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets. Her work has appeared in Tin House, e Los Angeles Review of Books, Callaloo, Best American Poetry, Harvard Review, American Poets, and elsewhere. She was awarded a Rona Ja e Foundation Writers’ Award, a Louis Untermeyer Scholarship in Poetry from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, a Kresge Literary Arts award as well as fellow- ships from Cave Canem, Callaloo, and the James Merrill House. One of Matthews’s current projects includes a cross-genre book that explores politics, poverty, race, and class. She is an assistant professor at Bryn Mawr College.

Airea D. Matthew headshot

Black Ecstatic Ode

Praise to the father holding his sleeping daughter on the 52nd
Street trolley
To the daughter sleeping through the pothole thrum
Praise to the diabetic with shorn feet and sugarcane blood
To the shooting nerve through the left hip and lower spine
To those flying gods on their routes
Praise to the red-headed Rasta and his ganja-laced T-shirt
To the Vietnam vet at Cass Corridor holding his sign
To the sign which reads: “I’m not homeless, I’m just Black”
Praise to the barbers trying to calm the fatherless boys in their chairs
To the mothers trying not to overhear this soothing
To soothing

Black Ecstatic Ode Read More »

Praise to the father holding his sleeping daughter on the 52nd
Street trolley
To the daughter sleeping through the pothole thrum
Praise to the diabetic with shorn feet and sugarcane blood
To the shooting nerve through the left hip and lower spine
To those flying gods on their routes
Praise to the red-headed Rasta and his ganja-laced T-shirt
To the Vietnam vet at Cass Corridor holding his sign
To the sign which reads: “I’m not homeless, I’m just Black”
Praise to the barbers trying to calm the fatherless boys in their chairs
To the mothers trying not to overhear this soothing
To soothing

Fanon and the Case of the Diasporic Haints

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* Airea D. Matthews *
We sat in my car for a short while before I turned the ignition. We needed to gather ourselves, to make some dumb sense of what just happened. We needed a moment, or a long lifetime, to figure out how beings think and move.

Fanon and the Case of the Diasporic Haints Read More »

* Airea D. Matthews *
We sat in my car for a short while before I turned the ignition. We needed to gather ourselves, to make some dumb sense of what just happened. We needed a moment, or a long lifetime, to figure out how beings think and move.

Animalia Repeating: A Pavlovian Account in Parts

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* Airea D. Matthews *

I genuflect at Mass, stealing fleeting glances of my sons’ hands in prayer—tender, unburdened by veins or violence, unscathed. I redirected my attention, prayed that whoever feared their black bodies would soon unlearn myth and space and threat.

Animalia Repeating: A Pavlovian Account in Parts Read More »

* Airea D. Matthews *

I genuflect at Mass, stealing fleeting glances of my sons’ hands in prayer—tender, unburdened by veins or violence, unscathed. I redirected my attention, prayed that whoever feared their black bodies would soon unlearn myth and space and threat.

Meeting Wittgenstein at the Playscape

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* Airea D. Matthews *

Since Tractatus suggests that language mirrors states of affairs in which objects are engaged, questions arise: if the object is invisible, does the object even exist? What if the object is the Black body?

Meeting Wittgenstein at the Playscape Read More »

* Airea D. Matthews *

Since Tractatus suggests that language mirrors states of affairs in which objects are engaged, questions arise: if the object is invisible, does the object even exist? What if the object is the Black body?

The Cross or The Pill

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There is no amount of being a privileged do-gooder that will do anyone any good if people can’t respectfully co-exist without entirely erasing each other—physically, geographically, economically, psychically—in the name of progress.

The Cross or The Pill Read More »

There is no amount of being a privileged do-gooder that will do anyone any good if people can’t respectfully co-exist without entirely erasing each other—physically, geographically, economically, psychically—in the name of progress.

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