In her debut collection, Unearth [The Flowers], Thea Matthews offers to the world a botanical garden in which each flower shines with the vision of healing. Grappling with issues such as child abuse, sexual assault, and racism in the United States, Matthews channels a voice which sounds both distinctly individual, yet powerfully communal through every poem.

Don’t we all have places to go like these? Wet
and stuffed with life, warm, not yet growing spots,

these great and hollowed grenades. I let myself coil in.
Like any good blanket that’s ever swaddled me safe,

Dear Emily, 

 

Congratulations on becoming Ecotheo's Social Justice editor!

My wife, Brenda, and I met as Peace Corps Volunteers in Brazil in the early 1970s and lived most of our adult life in that country.