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Yale Series of Younger Poets
Simulacra (Volume 111)
Winner of the 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets prize
A fresh and rebellious poetic voice, Airea D. Matthews debuts in the acclaimed series that showcases the work of exciting and innovative young American poets. Matthews’s superb collection explores the topic of want and desire with power, insight, and intense emotion. Her poems cross historical boundaries and speak emphatically from a racialized America, where the trajectories of joy and exploitation, striving and thwarting, violence and celebration are constrained by differentials of privilege and contemporary modes of communication. In his foreword, series judge Carl Phillips calls this book “rollicking, destabilizing, at once intellectually sly and piercing and finally poignant.” This is poetry that breaks new literary ground, inspiring readers to think differently about what poems can and should do in a new media society where imaginations are laid bare and there is no thought too provocative to send out into the world.
A fresh and rebellious poetic voice, Airea D. Matthews debuts in the acclaimed series that showcases the work of exciting and innovative young American poets. Matthews’s superb collection explores the topic of want and desire with power, insight, and intense emotion. Her poems cross historical boundaries and speak emphatically from a racialized America, where the trajectories of joy and exploitation, striving and thwarting, violence and celebration are constrained by differentials of privilege and contemporary modes of communication. In his foreword, series judge Carl Phillips calls this book “rollicking, destabilizing, at once intellectually sly and piercing and finally poignant.” This is poetry that breaks new literary ground, inspiring readers to think differently about what poems can and should do in a new media society where imaginations are laid bare and there is no thought too provocative to send out into the world.
- GenresPoetry
104 pages, Hardcover
First published March 28, 2017
8 people are currently reading
619 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 29 of 29 reviews
April 12, 2024
beautiful and experimental and multilayered in ways i still can't fully understand. can't believe this was airea d. matthews' debut. ahhh!!!!!!!!!! a poetry collection made to be reread over and over.
March 8, 2018
I took February off from reading poetry. I still heard it every Wednesday for a few hours, but I didn't sit down and read it.
Partly, it's style fatigue. Every manuscript I've seen has been a poet who learned A Trick to write a poem. Usually, a good one. But all of their poems were laid out the same way, or were written on the same theme, or they're all erasures, or they're all crowns of sonnets.
Airea D. Matthews's book is not like any of the books or manuscripts I've read recently.
Thank Yale.
This book goes everywhere, and yet feels really focused.
Some poems take a few pages to tell their stories, some are over in four lines because that's all the poem needs. There are letters, fugues, texts from dead literary figures, Greek hunters Twitter feeds, an opera script. All of it speaks to want, without feeling like the author is harping on a theme.
Were I teaching a course on poetry, this would be one of the books I taught from in the first semester, along with Natalie Díaz's When My Brother Was an Aztec, Safia Elhillo's The January Children, Patricia Smith's Blood Dazzler, Martín Espada's Imagine the Angels of Bread: Poems, Ocean Vuong's Night Sky with Exit Wounds, Daphne Gottlieb's 15 Ways to Stay Alive, and Grzegorz Wroblewski's Kopenhaga.
I wold recommend this to anyone who was turned off from poetry by professors who jerked off to dead white poets, people who come to poetry through spoken word and are wondering where to go next, people who like poetry that's challenging but not poetry that means you have to have a degree in loneliness to figure out what the fuck the writer is talking about, and really anyone who just likes good writing.
Partly, it's style fatigue. Every manuscript I've seen has been a poet who learned A Trick to write a poem. Usually, a good one. But all of their poems were laid out the same way, or were written on the same theme, or they're all erasures, or they're all crowns of sonnets.
Airea D. Matthews's book is not like any of the books or manuscripts I've read recently.
Thank Yale.
This book goes everywhere, and yet feels really focused.
Some poems take a few pages to tell their stories, some are over in four lines because that's all the poem needs. There are letters, fugues, texts from dead literary figures, Greek hunters Twitter feeds, an opera script. All of it speaks to want, without feeling like the author is harping on a theme.
Were I teaching a course on poetry, this would be one of the books I taught from in the first semester, along with Natalie Díaz's When My Brother Was an Aztec, Safia Elhillo's The January Children, Patricia Smith's Blood Dazzler, Martín Espada's Imagine the Angels of Bread: Poems, Ocean Vuong's Night Sky with Exit Wounds, Daphne Gottlieb's 15 Ways to Stay Alive, and Grzegorz Wroblewski's Kopenhaga.
I wold recommend this to anyone who was turned off from poetry by professors who jerked off to dead white poets, people who come to poetry through spoken word and are wondering where to go next, people who like poetry that's challenging but not poetry that means you have to have a degree in loneliness to figure out what the fuck the writer is talking about, and really anyone who just likes good writing.
December 1, 2017
Watch out for this one. Airea D. Matthews is going to be one to reckon with. I’ve been trying over many years to read all of the Yale Series of Younger Poets. This is the most powerful debut I’ve read yet. Science, spirituality, and Anne Sexton text messages from beyond.
September 29, 2022
Through experimental stylistic techniques and far-ranging literary references, Airea Matthews delivers us a captivating collection of poetry exploring desire and morality. Creating a simulacra of her own, in which the dead can text and gods can tweet; an ominous and tender hyperreality. Her repetitive evocation of figures such as anne sexton and sekhmet narrate how we find refuge and release in the literary and mythical when we are failed by the state, our families, or our own unreliability.
October 9, 2025
8/10.
Great poetry collection, which lacks enormously in terms of originality.
Either direct quotes, or by relying on previous authors, it just doesn't have its own style.
Great poetry collection, which lacks enormously in terms of originality.
Either direct quotes, or by relying on previous authors, it just doesn't have its own style.
June 21, 2017
Having just finished reading a moment ago, I am spellbound. I cannot decide whether to immediately start reading it again, or write until the ink runs out..
November 29, 2023
Airea Dee Matthews's debut is one of the most indubitably groundbreaking and hard-hitting poetry collections of the 21st century. In a deeply gothic form of feminism, Matthews explores various aspects of domestic depression in ingenious and fresh ways exclusive to 21st century lifestyle, such as phone texts or musical play scripts. Matthews interacts with her odd inhibitions through personas of her dead inspirations, including Gertrude Stein and Anne Sexton. Matthews's intuitive wit, darkly satirical humor, and a scathing gravity all intertwine to configure one of the most innovative works of 21st century literature, that may affect the way poets write about the world(s) around them for years to come.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
December 20, 2017
Virtuosic in form and language, Airea D. Matthews’s Simulacra reimagines numerous forms of communication, in lineated and prose poems haunted by ghosts and gods, both Egyptian and Greek, and the fragile imagined pasts we regard as memory and history, Matthews playfully and dynamically offering redacted epistles and beyond-the-grave sexting, dismantlings of so-called holy scripture, and various engagements with texts from a panoply of writers, including Jean Baudrillard, Anne Sexton, Gertrude Stein, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
June 1, 2017
This book assuredly is a fresh take on poetry respecting tradition and innovation simultaneously. Surprisingly, it aroused raw emotions which were both unnervingly and sweetly satisfying. I feel like I traveled through time, space, and participated in a bit of bold voyeurism.
October 6, 2019
Working my way through a stack of Yale Younger Poets winners. I'm starting to think that Carl Phillips and I have pretty different taste. This is the best of them so far, though...
August 15, 2019
I have been through this book 4 or 5 times in the last couple of years, but I'm not sure I have still "read" it. Every time I go back to it something new opens up for me. Either it's the formal inventiveness, using the devices and rhetorics that come with the new technologies. Or it's the emotional demands.
This is a book that is, I think, about "want" -- and that is NOT "desire." Desire is too filled with hope, even joy. WANT is desperate, almost psychotic. It forces the poet and her language to the very edge. And it forces her back into all the earlier, even the earliest manifestations of Want. It is frightening, almost makes me want to turn away. Yet I can't.
This book (and I think of it AS a book, not as individual poems that go together) has made demands on its author that are more severe, less forgiving, than any other recent book of poetry I know about. All the identity poems or the poems primarily of formal invention just pale in comparison. The demons here are real and just barely contained. After this, I'm going to have to go back and read some old things to recover.
This is a book that is, I think, about "want" -- and that is NOT "desire." Desire is too filled with hope, even joy. WANT is desperate, almost psychotic. It forces the poet and her language to the very edge. And it forces her back into all the earlier, even the earliest manifestations of Want. It is frightening, almost makes me want to turn away. Yet I can't.
This book (and I think of it AS a book, not as individual poems that go together) has made demands on its author that are more severe, less forgiving, than any other recent book of poetry I know about. All the identity poems or the poems primarily of formal invention just pale in comparison. The demons here are real and just barely contained. After this, I'm going to have to go back and read some old things to recover.
September 23, 2025
from Rebel Prelude: "in the garden / or our bedroom, we'd made love or // fought about bushes— / hydrangea or rhododendron // purple ivies climbing our back fence, / opal basil wilting, one of us // had forgotten to water her or was it / autumn and she was dying on her own?"
from From the Pocket of His Lip: "Smoke rose under my father's tongue. There, a strange man with an oboe sat on the ridge of his tooth, playing wide vibratos through nimbus fog. I asked why he was there, too."
from Sekhmet After Hours: "When away from battlefields, simple deceits / pacify my full-blaze feral ego. Something vapid / to calm and divert attention from all those / warm rebels left alive. The fiercest / warriors know when to turn their backs."
from From the Pocket of His Lip: "Smoke rose under my father's tongue. There, a strange man with an oboe sat on the ridge of his tooth, playing wide vibratos through nimbus fog. I asked why he was there, too."
from Sekhmet After Hours: "When away from battlefields, simple deceits / pacify my full-blaze feral ego. Something vapid / to calm and divert attention from all those / warm rebels left alive. The fiercest / warriors know when to turn their backs."
March 17, 2019
This one was tough for me to engage with. Perhaps I can not imagine a dead poet who never knew a cell phone texting me back. Perhaps I wonder if it was a nurse in a mental ward with a dead poet's name doing the texting. I couldn't tell, though it sounded more like the dead poet than the nurse, I think. I think there's some good stuff in here, but it simply wasn't for me. (I also don't like calculus and egyptian gods I know little about in my poetry). This is not a bad poetry book; it's just not for me.
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October 17, 2022This volume was over my head, but I appreciated that some of these poems sent me on a quest to learn more about Psyche and Sekhmet. If you're a Stein or a Sexton fan, you'll likely dig this volume. Favorite poem: Sekhmet After Hours.
July 31, 2017
After just one read the poetry of Airea Matthews has already pushed something within me more than most poetry can on initial introduction. I'm looking forward to reading deeper into it.
August 14, 2017
To the work!
September 12, 2017
Really interesting takes on form. The content itself needs a lot of unpacking, so it needs more than one read through, I think.
November 19, 2017
I gave this book the highest rating on the basis of just a few of the poems in it especially one about Anne Sexton. The rest of the work I found mostly bland and uninteresting.
February 12, 2018
My favorites were the ones in imagined text messages with Anne Sexton. Beautiful, bold, and heartbreaking work.
July 12, 2019
The formal busy-ness (business) is an alimentative procedure, developing sequence-space as it makes psycho-sexual testing an improvisation -- e.g., on texting.
December 27, 2019
My favorite book of poetry.
March 28, 2021
Solid weaving of the fantastical and the real, the contemporary and the timeless.
November 12, 2022
This was fxcking incredible and reading weil right before it was cool, saw many a thread
November 8, 2023
reading poetry is rly hard for me but this book had a lot of rly pretty prose and a lot of content i want to understand??
February 6, 2020
Called forth from muses as far-reaching as Anne Sexton and victims of the Salem witch trials, Matthews' poems refuse predictability immediately demand multiple readings. If you're one of the many who looks at Instagram poets and despairs for the state of Millenial poetry, Matthews will single-handedly prove that the new generation of poets is just as capable of creating true art as any — even (and especially) when invoking smartphone screens as a format.
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June 13, 2018I’m not giving this book a star rating, because I do not want to impact its overall Goodreads score.
All of Matthews’ poems have beautiful turns of phrase. About two-thirds have a rhythm, a beautiful rhythm, which is not reflected in the line breaks or formatting. But the author often tacks on extra words which disrupt the rhythm. It seemed to me as if she is aware of her phrasings but not aware of her language’s rhythm, and so, as an editor, she sacrifices the rhythm in order to keep her phrases. As a result, she diminishes the beauty of her own voice. This authorial deafness is pretty common for a young writer, but it is frankly strange to have to experience it as a reader.
Which brings me to the real issues with this book. The poems are written by someone who has not yet synthesized her ideas and experiences. These poems come across like notes from a college student’s reading journal. Many poems start as responses to the work of literary giants. There is an awful lot of collegiate-level name dropping (Baudrillard, Sexton, Barthes) in intercalary pages.
But I did appreciate these citations for what it portends in the younger generation of black intellectuals. It is extremely heartening to think that a new generation may feel free to publicly cite all areas of culture as part of their own identity. I don't think this has always been the norm for artists in the American black community.
All of Matthews’ poems have beautiful turns of phrase. About two-thirds have a rhythm, a beautiful rhythm, which is not reflected in the line breaks or formatting. But the author often tacks on extra words which disrupt the rhythm. It seemed to me as if she is aware of her phrasings but not aware of her language’s rhythm, and so, as an editor, she sacrifices the rhythm in order to keep her phrases. As a result, she diminishes the beauty of her own voice. This authorial deafness is pretty common for a young writer, but it is frankly strange to have to experience it as a reader.
Which brings me to the real issues with this book. The poems are written by someone who has not yet synthesized her ideas and experiences. These poems come across like notes from a college student’s reading journal. Many poems start as responses to the work of literary giants. There is an awful lot of collegiate-level name dropping (Baudrillard, Sexton, Barthes) in intercalary pages.
But I did appreciate these citations for what it portends in the younger generation of black intellectuals. It is extremely heartening to think that a new generation may feel free to publicly cite all areas of culture as part of their own identity. I don't think this has always been the norm for artists in the American black community.
November 2, 2017
I’m not smart enough for this book but I want to be.
Read
December 30, 2017I don’t rate friends, but this book is a lot of hell yes.
Displaying 1 - 29 of 29 reviews