AIREA D. MATTHEWS in conversation with DEVON WALKER-FIGUEROA
In January and February 2025, poet Devon Walker-Figueroa had the following conversation via Google Drive with the poet Airea D. Matthews, while Walker-Figueroa was in Spain and Matthews was in Senegal.
Walker-Figueroa notes, “Matthews’s creative and academic work exist in thrilling confluence, dialoguing seamlessly with a range of complex subjects and movements—from international modernism and Black avant-garde poetics to semiotics, economics, and Sumerian hymns. Her poems are as wide-ranging in concern as in stylistic imperative, and they consistently reveal, through careful vivisection of idiom and register, how language mediates our understanding of unstable realities and norms. In this interview, we delve into her poetic innovations, interdisciplinary practice, and the muses of desire and exchange.”
DEVON WALKER-FIGUEROA
Your first collection, Simulacra, opens with a sonnet, and your second, Bread and Circus, with a tilted column of text, whose lines, of varying typographical density, angle down across the page on an axis, perhaps implying the poem is an expression not just linguistic but also algebraic in nature. All to say, you write in an exhilarating variety of forms and formats. How would you describe your relationship to form? And to media more broadly, including photography and typography? And how has your relationship to form and media shifted or evolved over the course of your practice?
AIREA D. MATTHEWS
Form, for me, has always been a question of tension—how best to hold, fracture, compress, or release an idea on the page. My first book, Simulacra, leaned into traditional forms as a kind of formal mimicry, a deliberate way to create and distort expectation. The opening sonnet, for example, is both homage and defiance; it embraces the tight structure of the form while questioning the reliability of language itself.
With Bread and Circus, my approach to form evolved into something more visually and structurally pliable. That opening poem, with its cascading, shifting typography, embodies the algebraic nature of economic structures—how language, when fragmented, mirrors not just poetic impulse but also the broader breakdown of systems. I think of the page as a spatial equation, where meaning is determined not just by what is written but by how it moves, how it occupies or abandons space.
My engagement with photography and typography has followed a similar trajectory. Both are technologies of seeing, of framing and un-framing reality. Bread and Circus incorporates spectral imaging—layering the visible and the erased—because I’m interested in how history is often palimpsestic, how the residue of the past is still very much present, lingering in its erasures. Over time, my relationship to these media has become more interdisciplinary, more attuned to the way visual forms can unsettle text, can force a reader to not just read but encounter a poem.
DEVON WALKER-FIGUEROA
In Simulacra, you seem deeply invested in conversations across temporal, spatial, and even linguistic boundaries—pulling in Anne Sexton and the Egyptian goddess Sekhmet, as well as French existentialists and semioticians including Barthes and Baudrillard, a variety of thinkers who trouble our perception of language and truth. I’m curious which writers and thinkers most fervently engage your intellect these days.
AIREA D. MATTHEWS
Lately, I’ve been in deep conversation—spiritually and intellectually—with thinkers who interrogate fugitivity, longing, and the architecture of the unseen. Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments continue to shape my understanding of historical rupture and the possibilities of archival refusal. Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake is another text that keeps calling me back, particularly in its treatment of Black existence as a continual negotiation of presence and loss.
Beyond the academic, I find myself returning to musicologists like Olly Wilson, who writes about the Black Sonic as a site of both resistance and survival. I’m also drawn to thinkers who trouble the notion of the stable self—Édouard Glissant’s opacity, Dionne Brand’s fugitive knowledge, the poetics of disappearance.
DEVON WALKER-FIGUEROA
My understanding of your way of being-in-the-world and practicing poetry is that you are intellectually omnivorous, drawing from a deep well of literary knowledge, but also an ongoing engagement with philosophy, visual arts, architecture, and various genres of music, among other modes and methods of inquiry and experience. Could you talk a little bit about how your fascinations and modes of inquiry/expression interact with each other in your poetic practice but also just in your life more broadly?
AIREA D. MATTHEWS
My poetic practice is an ecosystem of inquiry. I think of it as a fugitive discipline—one that refuses to stay within the strict borders of literary study and instead moves through philosophy, architecture, music, and economic theory. I approach poetry as both excavation and construction. One day I might be studying blueprints, considering how a cathedral’s acoustics shape the way we experience silence, and the next I’m deep in eighteenth-century economic theory, questioning the assumed neutrality of capitalism.
My life and my work are deeply entangled in these pursuits. Even outside of poetry, I find myself tracking patterns—how a jazz improvisation might mimic the spontaneous decision-making of a fugitive in flight, or how Baroque architecture manipulates light to create a heightened sense of movement and transcendence. Everything is connected; poetry is simply where I translate these interactions into language.
DEVON WALKER-FIGUEROA
“The worst geometry: circles,” you write in “Letters to My Would-Be Lover on Geometry and Ponds,” a poem that lives in a book whose design features the double helix. Is it safe to say that your poems flirt with geometry? If so, are there any patterns or forms in nature, or art for that matter, that you find yourself returning to when you’re deciding how to shape a poem?
AIREA D. MATTHEWS
My poems flirt with geometry. I am drawn to structures that hold and disrupt—fractals, helixes, and the asymmetry of natural growth. Circles, as I mention in Simulacra, trouble me because they imply enclosure and inevitability. I prefer spirals, which suggest return without repetition.
The double helix, which appears on Simulacra’s cover, embodies a central tension in my work: inheritance and mutation. It represents both lineage and flux, the idea that we carry ancestral narratives within us, but they evolve, shift, and rearticulate with each generation. When deciding how to format a poem, I often think about these natural structures—how water moves in eddies, how vines disrupt a rigid fence line, and how fugitive pathways like those of kites in the desert refuse the predictability of the grid.
DEVON WALKER-FIGUEROA
Whenever I’m reading your poems, I’m struck by how aware you are that you are working in a medium that involves not just time and matter, but also space. You arrange your spaces with the same conscientiousness with which you place the words themselves. You recognize and never lose your sense that the poetic medium is as involved with the presence of words and sounds as with their absence. Would you mind talking a little bit about how you apprehend and treat space when you write—on the level of page and line, but also emotionally and conceptually (for example, “making” or “holding” space for certain experiences, identities, desires, or griefs)?
AIREA D. MATTHEWS
Space, both literal and conceptual, is fundamental to how I write. On the page, space is breath—it creates tempo, tension, and silence. I use white space the way a composer uses rests; absence isn’t emptiness, it’s a kind of charged waiting.
Beyond the page, space is also about permission and recognition. When I write, I am making space for certain histories, identities, and absences that have been ignored, overwritten. In this way, poetry becomes an act of reclamation, of ensuring that what was once invisible is now undeniable.
DEVON WALKER-FIGUEROA
To follow that, I want to ask about your approach to time, which you also handle as a pliable medium. I’m thinking back to “Sexton Texts a Dead Addict’s Daughter During Polar Vortex” and how, in that poem, the weather becomes a third sort of speaker in the poem, an elemental voice intruding and rearranging the order in which each message is received. This temporal tempest blew my mind when I first encountered it, and I have so much admiration for that poem and the operatic scope you give to a text-message conversation. Would you mind describing how you discovered or invented that form? Also, do you have a name for it?
AIREA D. MATTHEWS
Time, like space, is something I try to manipulate in my work. Poetry allows for simultaneity—past, present, and future can exist at once. In “Sexton Texts a Dead Addict’s Daughter During Polar Vortex,” I wanted to disrupt linearity, to let time collapse in on itself. The weather in that poem acts as a kind of interloper, bending the sequence of communication, mirroring how grief distorts our perception of time.
The text and tweet as formal carriers first occurred to me in graduate school. I was intrigued by their tangential, shifting nature—how they existed not as fixed literary objects but as ephemeral correspondences, always moving, always dependent on context. Unlike traditional poetic forms, which often have an inherent structure or expectation of continuity, early text messaging and tweets were fragmented and temporally unstable. The timestamp, in particular, fascinated me. In those days, when you received a text, you might not always get the messages in sequence; sometimes, you’d get the last message first and the first last. There was a kind of technological rupture in communication, where meaning could be plasticized—stretched, distorted, rearranged—by something as simple as the order in which the messages arrived.
That disruption of time and order is something I carried into my poetry. The text as a form suggested a different way of structuring language, one where meaning is contingent, where sequencing is unreliable, and where the very architecture of communication resists stability. I never specifically named the form I developed in “Sexton Texts a Dead Addict’s Daughter,” but I think of it as dialectical or “versum filum”—a layering of moments where past and present blur, creating a kind of narrative vertigo. It is a form that leans into instability, acknowledging that time is rarely linear, that memory, grief, and language all function in fragments, in echoes, in disruption.
DEVON WALKER-FIGUEROA
“Smug bitch. Acted like I didn’t exist. / (What if she was right?)” These are the opening lines to your marvelous poem “On Meeting Want for the First Time” from Simulacra. Want, desire, longing, appetite. These are themes with which both books are concerned, and which are given the power not only to negate personhood, seemingly, but truth itself. Of course, each book treats these in distinct ways. For example, while addiction to substances and appetites of the flesh are treated directly in both collections, addiction’s role in our economy, our collective appetite for material commodities (bread, butter, even guns and one another), and the way in which capitalism has transmogrified our desires, is treated more directly in Bread and Circus. Could you talk a little bit about your poems’ dialogue with the themes of appetite and want?
AIREA D. MATTHEWS
Desire is the undercurrent of everything I write. In Simulacra, desire was largely linguistic—a longing for understanding, for connection across time and form. In Bread and Circus, desire became more material, more directly entangled with capitalism and commodification.
I’m deeply interested in how appetite is constructed—how capitalism teaches us to crave, to consume, to hunger for things that will never satiate. We are programmed to want, conditioned to believe that enough is never supposed to be enough—whether in endogenous or exogenous relationships. Internally, we are socialized to seek validation, to measure our worth by accumulation—of knowledge, power, wealth, and recognition. Externally, we are inundated with messages that reinforce a cycle of perpetual insufficiency, convincing us that fulfillment is always just out of reach, always contingent on the next acquisition, the next achievement, and the next desire.
This is a fundamental tenet of capitalism: to sustain itself, it must create hunger where there was once contentment. It is not enough to own one thing; we must desire the next version, the upgrade, the excess. This economic logic shapes even intimacy, even the ways we love. We are taught to see relationships—romantic, familial, platonic—through the lens of possession, through the calculus of need versus availability. The poems in Bread and Circus wrestle with this insatiability, questioning what it means to desire in a system designed to keep us wanting, and what happens when that wanting is never fulfilled.
The book examines not only personal appetite—addiction, longing, the fits of flesh hunger—but also the collective appetites that shape economies and histories. Bread and Circus is particularly invested in the ways capitalism transmogrifies our desires, how it turns hunger into currency, into power. There is undeniable violence in this system: the body becomes a commodity, desire becomes a means of control, and consumption—of goods, of labor, of people—becomes the driving force of existence.
I think of my work as an interrogation of these forces, a way to unravel the mechanics of want, to ask whether it is possible to unlearn the programming, to sit in a space of sufficiency rather than scarcity. But the challenge of writing about appetite is that I, too, am caught in its grip. Poetry itself is a form of desire—an attempt to name, to hold, to capture what is fleeting. In that sense, my work is both critique and complicity, both resistance and surrender to the impossible longing that structures our world.
DEVON WALKER-FIGUEROA
In a recent interview, you spoke a bit about vulnerability’s role in Bread and Circus as opposed to its role in Simulacra, in which you were writing in an anti-confessional mode (among other modes). Could you describe what informed this shift toward writing in a way that made your personal history more available to the public? And what has that felt like as Bread and Circus has been read and reviewed? What has it been like to see people responding to work that is at once, yes, constructed—and so meticulously!—but also which possesses the happenstance intimacies of life-as-it’s-lived and not just as it’s represented?
AIREA D. MATTHEWS
In Simulacra, I wrote with a deliberate distance—a kind of anti-confessional posture that allowed me to interrogate personal history without fully inhabiting it. But with Bread and Circus, I had to step into the work differently. The book demanded a level of exposure I had previously resisted.
Writing in a more personal mode felt necessary, but it was also terrifying. Seeing readers engage with these deeply intimate histories—some of which are still tender, recently closed wounds—has been both affirming and disorienting. Vulnerability, I’ve learned, is both a risk and a gift.
DEVON WALKER-FIGUEROA
What would you say the relationship is between brutality and ceremony in your poetry? I’m thinking of the sanguineous/eucharistic evening meals in “The Mine Owner’s Wife” and the doomed and dooming ritual of tooth-pulling in “The Good Dentist’s Wife” in Simulacra, as well as of the marriage foregrounded in Bread and Circus, introduced to the reader in the poem “March, 1969,” in which the bride-to-be stumbles and tears her knee open on the “march” up to the altar. A line from the latter is: “Each new product is / ceremoniously acclaimed as a unique creation.”
AIREA D. MATTHEWS
Brutality and ceremony are inextricable in my work because they are inextricable in history. Ritual can be a site of violence, just as violence can be ritualized. I’m fascinated by the ways in which social and economic structures sanctify harm—how a marriage, an inheritance, a meal can carry both tenderness and terror.
The poems in Simulacra and Bread and Circus return to these tensions often, questioning the ways in which power is both celebrated and concealed. Marriage, in particular, is a structure I find endlessly compelling, not just because of its personal and cultural significance, but because of its historical function as an economic and political arrangement. The notion of marrying for love is, on the historical timeline, a relatively new concept. For most of human history, marriage was not a union of romance but a contract—a transaction negotiated between families, often to consolidate wealth, secure alliances, or produce heirs. Love, if it appeared at all, was incidental.
In ancient societies, marriage served as a form of social and financial control, often disproportionately disadvantaging women. Dowries, bride prices, and arranged unions positioned marriage as a kind of economic transfer, a movement of assets disguised as tradition. Even in Western history, the transition toward companionate marriage—where personal choice and emotional connection became factors—was slow and largely shaped by economic shifts rather than ideological ones. The Industrial Revolution, for example, altered family structures by creating financial independence outside of the agrarian household, giving individuals more autonomy in choosing a partner. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw the gradual emergence of the idea that marriage should be based on mutual affection. Yet, even now, economic security remains a silent but powerful undercurrent in how we pair and commit.
Understanding this history turned me cynical about marriage for years. It felt impossible to disentangle the institution from its origins in control, property, and social engineering. I questioned whether love could ever be fully extricated from these structures, whether the ceremony itself was a kind of submission to a history of economic coercion. It wasn’t until I examined my childhood that I began to understand the root of my cynicism.
Growing up, I saw how love, despite its professed ideals, was often entangled in power and survival. I saw how relationships were shaped by necessity, by obligation, by forces larger than individual desire. That recognition complicated my understanding of intimacy—how it is shaped by history but also by the personal, by the small inheritances of what we are taught to expect from love and commitment. My skepticism wasn’t just about marriage as a social institution; it was about the ways I had been conditioned to view attachment, to question its authenticity in the face of structural inevitability.
That realization reshaped my writing. It allowed me to see marriage—and ritual more broadly—as neither wholly oppressive nor wholly redemptive, but as a liminal space where both brutality and beauty coexist. In Bread and Circus, the opening poem frames marriage through this dual lens—where a march to the altar results in a torn knee, where the ceremony is both pageantry and wound. I return to these themes because they remain unresolved. After all, history lingers in the present, because even in moments of tenderness, the shadow of inheritance remains.
I write about marriage, ritual, and inheritance—not to reject them, but to interrogate them, to hold them up to the light and ask: what have we carried forward? What have we mistaken for love? What do we name as a ceremony that is, in fact, a reenactment of power? These questions sit at the heart of my work, shaping my approach to history, to intimacy, and to the ongoing negotiation between past and present.
DEVON WALKER-FIGUEROA
Last we spoke, you had purchased a building in Sicily (a country to which you have familial ties through your mother, correct?) and were hoping to start a writing residency/asylum program there. What is your vision for that? And how does your work in various literary communities—as an educator and community facilitator—interact with your artistic practice?
AIREA D. MATTHEWS
Yes, my mother’s paternal side is from Montelepre, Sicily, outside of Palermo in the northwestern part of the island. I recently acquired a home in Troina (in the north-central region of the Nebrodi mountains) to establish a writing residency. At the turn of the twentieth century, my grandfather fled Sicily, like many other immigrants, to find stability and safety for his primary family (his wife and their newborn). Some years later, he would meet my grandmother, a Black woman who fled the South during the Great Migration, seeking something similar. A full century later, we see these patterns of reverse migration, where people are going back to the southern states and back to places like Sicily.
My third book is about the collision of human will and fate for which these types of migration stand as an illustration. For research purposes, a large portion of the book is being written in Sicily, and it made sense to have a home base there. It also made sense to have that space be a refuge of cultural expansion and immersion for other writers. The residency is an extension of my larger artistic and communal practice—a way to provide time, space, and resources for others, just as I have been given those gifts throughout my career. Carving space—for writing, for reckoning, for remembering—is, I believe, one of the most vital things we can do for other writers. To be capacious, generous, helpful, and hospitable is, in my view, to be fully human.
AIREA D. MATTHEWS is a professor at Bryn Mawr College, where she co-directs the creative writing program. A Guggenheim fellow and Philadelphia’s former Poet Laureate, she is the author of two books of poems: Simulacra, which won the 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, and Bread and Circus (Scribner, 2024), winner of the 2024 LA Times Book Prize.
DEVON WALKER-FIGUEROA teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University. A recent Amy Lowell Travelling Scholar, she is the author of two collections of poetry, Lazarus Species (Milkweed, 2025) and Philomath (Milkweed, 2021), and the novella Hold Harmless (Ploughshares Solos, 2025). Philomath, a National Poetry Series selection, was awarded the Levis Reading Prize, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize for Best First Book.
