“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
“These poems are alive. Anthems, war cries, hymns, love songs—poems that rightly and constantly question and blur the lines between beloved and enemy, history and reality: ‘A cricket sings on my knee / by playing a violin made of pennies.’ This collection is an homage to the mysterious experience of time and change, place and bewilderment. With GRIME, Matthews has given us all a stellar poetic engagement with the world.”
—ROBIN COSTE LEWIS, author of To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness
“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
“Thea Matthews declares that the core of GRIME, her blistering and revelatory take on exactly what makes us human, is ‘an experience to face.’ That encounter, driven by deftly-craved poems with no wasted movement—is by no an unexacting one. It’s restless, impelling and breaking all the right rules. The personas that drive this collection have overwhelmed silence—the voices here bring both stories that both hurt and heal. There is no turning away.”
—PATRICIA SMITH, author of Blood Dazzler
“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
