Photo Credit: Kylie Murrin
“Who doesn’t want to be loved?” Thea Matthews writes from the persona of an estranged father of three daughters before, at least as the poem suggests, he enters a church with the singular goal of unmaking everything inside. And so often, Matthews’s poems are interested in just that—revealing complicated portraits of the lovelorn, or perhaps those our society has deemed “unlovable,” the cast aside, as they wade through the muck of controversial subjects such as gun violence, alcohol and drug abuse, history, anti-Black racism, protest, unemployment, potential (maybe avoided) futures richly detailed in sometimes clipped, fractured stanzas. Deploying familiar, if not found language often as refrain, Matthews shows us ourselves, shows us our nation, and what it deems significant enough to value or keep.
— NATHAN MCCLAIN, author of Previously Owned (Four Way Books, 2022); and poetry editor of The Massachusetts Review.
THEA MATTHEWS is a poet of African and Indigenous Mexican descent originally from San Francisco, California. She holds an MFA in poetry from New York University and a BA in sociology from UC Berkeley. Her poetry has appeared in the Colorado Review, The Common, Obsidian Lit & Arts in the African Diaspora, The Massachusetts Review, The New Republic, Epiphany, Alta Journal, On the Seawall, and others. She was nominated for Best New Poets in 2022 and Best of the Net in 2021. Her first book Unearth [The Flowers] was published by Red Light Lit Press and was listed under Kirkus Reviews’ Best Indie Poetry of 2020. She teaches creative writing workshops and serves as a creative writing coach to adolescent girls at CinnamonGirl. In the fall and early winter of 2023, Matthews was a poet in residence for the Museum of African Diaspora and a programming curator for the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
