In-Store: Thea Matthews: Grime w/ Dorothea Lasky

Event guidelines:

• Tickets are limited to restrict capacity at our store, and each ticket will include either a copy of the featured books or a $10 Books Are Magic gift card.
• Additional copies of the books will be available for purchase at the event.
• A signing will follow the talk.
• The event will be livestreamed for free online here: https://youtube.com/live/0hG8DyOjKOc
• Home address is collected for contact tracing purposes; it will not be used otherwise.
• As a reminder: If you are not feeling well, please do not come to the event, even if you have a ticket; email us and we'll work it out.

If you have any questions regarding these guidelines or to request accessibility accommodations, please contact ZXZlbnRoZWxwIHwgYm9va3NhcmVtYWdpYyAhIG5ldA==.

From addiction and familial dysfunction to gentrification and police brutality, GRIME examines harsh realities through an activist lens with a rare deftness of poetic form.

GRIME is the underbelly of the city and the dirt found in the human psyche. These poems explore the dichotomous gravity of despair and desire, apathy and protest, defeat and survival. They trace San Francisco's skyline to encapsulate being born and raised in a metropolis that has grown increasingly strange to its native citizens, even as it serves as a mnemonic for past trauma and death.

Part elegy, part call to resistance, GRIME chronicles Matthews' childhood growing up in the Tenderloin, amidst the glamour and allure of its drug-fueled street life and the squalor of its poverty and addiction, even as the poems veer off from the autobiographical into portraits and dramatic monologues, on the one hand, and experiments with traditional forms like ghazals and pantoums, on the other. The poems hold grit and anguish in one breath, marrying an unflinching eye to a rare formal assurance. As austerity pushes the margins of each page, in poem after poem, the setting shifts, the characters assume different names, yet every moment interlocks to expose the grime of living in the city.

Yet GRIME is also a story of triumph and resiliency in the face of insurmountable odds, an assertion of the power of poetry in wrestling with grief, addiction, and calamity. It seeks moments of healing based on interpersonal connection and faith. GRIME is a poetics of survival and defiance.

Thea Matthews is a poet 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 work has appeared in Colorado Review, The Common, Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, The Massachusetts Review, The New Republic, Alta Journal, among others. Matthews is the author of GRIME (City Lights Books, 2025). Her debut collection, Unearth [The Flowers], was published by Red Light Lit Press and was named one of Kirkus Reviews’ Best Indie Poetry Books of 2020. Matthews lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Dorothea Lasky is the author of eight full-length collections of poetry, including, most recently, The Shining (Wave Books, 2023) and MOTHER (Wave Books, 2026).She is also the author of the prose books MEMORY (Semiotext(e), 2025) and Animal (Wave Books, 2019), as well as the editor of Essays (Essay Press, 2023) and aco-editor of Open the Door: How to Excite Young People About Poetry (McSweeney's, 2013). Her novel, Katie, is forthcoming from Harper Perennial.Her writing has appeared in POETRY, The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, and The Paris Review, among other places.

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