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  • Airea D. Matthews2016 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award Winner
  • Carl Phillips (bio)

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2016 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award Winner

Photograph courtesy of Haya Alfarhan

AIREA D. MATTHEWS

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One way to read Airea D. Matthews’s simulacra—however protean in its formal strategies and multifarious in its entry-points to the restlessness that meaning mostly comes down to—is as a meditation on want, in at least two senses of the word. Want, as in desire, craving, be it for the body’s release or the differently unpredictable release that heroin offers; desire, too, to give shape and substance, in the form of language, to the abstraction of wanting. But also want, as in lack, and the ways in which our emptinesses—physical, emotional, psychological—drive us to fill them, to try to, hence addiction in all its guises, hence the impulse toward speech as the attempt to express what we somehow can never quite accept might be inexpressible. Language as rescue, language as its own sly form of addiction.

It makes sense, given this reading, that the poetry itself is omnivorous, taking into itself text messages, Tweets, fable and music, personae ranging from ancient Egyptian deities to the 20th century Anne Sexton, and such theoretical, linguistic, and literary influences as Baudrillaud, Wittgenstein, and Stein. A more quiet but increasingly resonant under-note across the collection is the conundrum of race, of blackness in particular, of identity more generally. Who are we? What does it mean to want to escape the self if the self remains a stranger? What self do we escape to? In whom rests the power—the permission—both to answer these questions, and to ask them?

In simulacra, Airea D. Matthews delivers that increasingly rare thing: a poetry that at once invites and demands rereading, one that shows us a possible future for the art even as it incorporates and redefines earlier tradition. Matthews makes me see the world as I’ve never seen it. Surely this is poetry’s first imperative. How rewarding to encounter so timely and lasting and necessary a voice in these strange days of ours. [End Page 780]

Carl Phillips

CARL PHILLIPS is the author of thirteen books of poetry, most recently Wild Is the Wind (FSG, 2018); Reconnaissance (FSG, 2015), winner of the PEN USA Award and the Lambda Literary Award; and Silverchest (FSG, 2013), finalist for the International Griffin Prize for Poetry. He is also the author of two books of prose: The Art of Daring: Risk, Restlessness, Imagination (Graywolf, 2014) and Coin of the Realm: Essays on the Life and Art of Poetry (Graywolf, 2004); and he has translated Sophocles' Philoctetes (Oxford, 2004). A four-time finalist for the National Book Award, his other honors include the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry, the Kingsley Tufts Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement, the Theodore Roethke Memorial Foundation Award in Poetry, induction into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Library of Congress, and the Academy of American Poets. Currently the judge for the Yale Younger Poets Series, Phillips teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.

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