Grime

The strong latest from Matthews (Unearth [The Flowers]) recounts her childhood in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood, a place estranged from its natives and haunted by echoes of past suffering. These poems explore human resilience and survival in its many forms; as Matthews writes in an author’s note, “The ‘eye’ or ‘I’ of the poem shifts and morphs, yet regardless of the poem, the speaker is an extension of the self, a prism angle of the human conscience.” The opening entry delivers the collection’s musical charge: “Teeth-marked fluorescent lamps laminate corneas./ Cosmopolitans mingle with crack./ Abandoned churches hold abandoned crosses.” Later poems employ caesuras mid-line, capturing the sense of fragmentation the collection circles: “Gentrified apartment complexes/ dissolve,/ disintegrate,/ crumble into dust,/ everything goes black” (“Dez”). Moments of introspective awareness are woven throughout—“Sharon Olds dares me/ to write a poem about joy,/ and I lie to her, saying, I can’t”—complementing Matthews’s leaps in form, which include “A Ghazal Through Erotic City”: “I want to fly higher, surpass your light,/ like Icarus, my wings melt in erotic city.” Throughout, she excels at conjuring vivid images: “My head is a gallon/ of bile in a hot air balloon.” The result is a memorable and elegiac ode to family and place. (Sept.)