Bread and Circus

Formally ambidextrous, teethed with wit and uncompromising dignity." Ocean Vuong Bread and Circus is a hybrid and palimpsestic memoir-in-verse: it combines poetry, photography and spectral imaging to explore the realities of economic necessity and marginal poverty through a personal lens. Examining the experience of the US urban Black community from a variety of perspectives, it draws heavily on Airea D. Matthews's archival research on Adam Smith, the eighteenth-century Scottish economist, as well as his magnum opus, The Wealth of Nations. As the perspective shifts from watchful child, to teacher, mother, writer and citizen, Bread and Circus asks what it is to have survived, indeed to have flourished, and at what cost.