Photo Credit: Coskun Caglayan

“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 work has appeared in Colorado Review, The Common, Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, The Massachusetts Review, The New Republic, Epiphany, Alta Journal, On the Seawall, and other publications.

Matthews is the author of GRIME (City Lights, 2025), Spotlight Series #25. Her debut collection, Unearth [The Flowers], was published by Red Light Lit Press and was named one of Kirkus Reviews’ Best Indie Poetry Books of 2020. She was nominated for Best New Poets in 2022 and Best of the Net in 2021.

She teaches creative writing workshops and mentors adolescent girls as a creative writing coach at CinnamonGirl. In fall and early winter 2023, she served as a poet-in-residence at the Museum of the African Diaspora and as a programming curator for the UC Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive. Matthews is also an editor and currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.

ORDER NOW

“Thea Matthews is a masterful poet writing with near unmatched ferocity and precision. Her new collection, GRIME, is as sumptuous as a novel. These are brilliantly observed poems, and piercing monologues of witness. Frank, fearless and full of love, it is easy to fall in line with Matthew’s gorgeous and spellbinding work.”

—JAMES CAGNEY, author of Ghetto Koans: A Personal Archive

“Thea Matthews does something almost no one is doing any more—she writes dramatic monologues; she inhabits others—murderers, racist cops, sad victims of the same. And she’s great at it. And she inhabits herself as if from the outside, writing dispassionate and harrowing reports from addiction, from the ravages of Reaganomics, from the grimy San Francisco streets. But despite the grim grime, these are the poems of someone who made it, and they’re not sensational, they’re not salacious; they’re lyrical and shapely and grime has never sounded so beautiful.”

—MATTHEW ROHRER, author of Army of Giants

ORDER NOW

“Thea Matthews is the voice and protector of our generation. Brave poems like a universe that has decided to go forward with a third testament. Thea Matthews is our sacred underground; the only host of our ascension.”

— TONGO EISEN-MARTIN, author of Blood on the Fog

“Unearth [The Flowers] is a refusal of silence and a testament to survival, speaking back to the damages with a gorgeous bouquet of poems. Thea Matthews conjures poetic magic for healing and bearing witness with vibrant, lyrically rich poems.”

— TIANA CLARK, author of I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood

“Unearth [The Flowers] sees the pastoral tradition of poetry through a contemporary feminist lens that shows Thea Matthews as a writer of urgency and authentic concern. Or as Matthews herself says, ‘where there is land / there is blood.’ This is a book of catalogue, of taxonomy, of the need to name the earth and stand on it whole.”

— JERICHO BROWN, author of The Tradition

“Thea Matthews is a poetic herbalist, using flowers to create healing. This work is egalitarian, touching on blooms of all sorts: indigenous, imported, bolted, and cultivated. You will feel these poems in the root of your jaw, in your foot arches.”

— KIM SHUCK, San Francisco Poet Laureate