UNEARTH [THE FLOWERS] BY THEA MATTHEWS
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An electrifying letter to family, country, and self, Unearth [The Flowers] is an essential collection, relentless in its journey through stages of grief and healing while celebrating life. Each poem is an anthem for resiliency, a testament to survival, a triumph over the stigmatized terror that pervades the everyday. Thea Matthews’s first full-length collection of poetry details a mind, body, and flower at the intersection of the personal and the political.
Download the press kit here.
Price includes shipping.
Shipping included in US.
An electrifying letter to family, country, and self, Unearth [The Flowers] is an essential collection, relentless in its journey through stages of grief and healing while celebrating life. Each poem is an anthem for resiliency, a testament to survival, a triumph over the stigmatized terror that pervades the everyday. Thea Matthews’s first full-length collection of poetry details a mind, body, and flower at the intersection of the personal and the political.
Download the press kit here.
Price includes shipping.
Shipping included in US.
An electrifying letter to family, country, and self, Unearth [The Flowers] is an essential collection, relentless in its journey through stages of grief and healing while celebrating life. Each poem is an anthem for resiliency, a testament to survival, a triumph over the stigmatized terror that pervades the everyday. Thea Matthews’s first full-length collection of poetry details a mind, body, and flower at the intersection of the personal and the political.
Download the press kit here.
Price includes shipping.
ADVANCE PRAISE
“Unearth [The Flowers] is a blooming battle cry, a feat of alchemy in which the personal and political merge in a brutal empathy. Rage and sorrow and the liberation of healing unfurl in a landscape of flowers—this is true literary witchcraft.”
— MICHELLE TEA, author of Against Memoir
“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
“Thea Matthews is a poetic herbalist, using flowers to create healing. This work is egalitarian, touching on blooms of all sorts: indigenous, imported, bolted, and cultivated. You will feel these poems in the root of your jaw, in your foot arches. Matthews is an experienced poet with a deft hand and an honest heart. These words languidly stretch, snap like a lock blade, they drape and twine and reach. Read this work and be changed.”
— KIM SHUCK, San Francisco Poet Laureate
“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
THEA MATTHEWS is a poet and educator of African and Indigenous Mexican descent originally from San Francisco, California. She holds an MFA in poetry from New York University and a BA in sociology from UC Berkeley. Her poetry has appeared in or is forthcoming in The Massachusetts Review, Epiphany Magazine, Obsidian Lit & Arts in the African Diaspora, Alta Journal, On the Seawall, The Cortland Review, The New Republic, and others. She was nominated for Best New Poets in 2022 and Best of the Net in 2021. Her first book Unearth [The Flowers] was published by Red Light Lit Press and was listed under Kirkus Reviews’ Best Indie Poetry of 2020. She has taught creative writing at the university level and through organizations such as the Writing Salon. Currently, Thea Matthews is a poet in residence at the Museum of African Diaspora, works at the Academy of American Poets, and lives in Brooklyn.