Join us as we celebrate the release of Grime, the much-anticipated new book by Thea Matthews. She will be in conversation with Matthew Dickman

About GRIME

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.

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.

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

Matthew Dickman is the author of Husbandry, Wonderland, Mayakovsky’s Revolver, and All-American Poem, winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize. His other honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Sarton Award for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a father, teacher, and freelance creative living in Portland, Oregon