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author portrait of a woman with flowers in her afro

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 or is forthcoming in the Colorado Review, The CommonObsidian Lit & Arts in the African Diaspora, The Massachusetts Review, Epiphany Magazine, Alta Journal, On the Seawall, and others. She was nominated for Best New Poets in 2022 and Best of the Net in 2021Her 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 and is an editor. In the fall and early winter of 2023, Thea 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.

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AN ELECTRIFYING LETTER to family, country, and self.

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. Matthews is an experienced poet with a deft hand and an honest heart. These words languidly stretch, snap like a lock blade, they drape and twine and reach. Read this work and be changed.”

— KIM SHUCK, San Francisco Poet Laureate

 
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