Bread and Circus

<p><b>Formally ambidextrous, teethed with wit and uncompromising dignity.&quot; &ndash; Ocean Vuong</b><br><br><i>Bread and Circus</i> 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.<br><br>Examining the experience of the US urban Black community from a variety of perspectives, it draws heavily on the author&rsquo;s archival research on Adam Smith, the eighteenth-century Scottish economist, as well as his magnum opus, <i>The Wealth of Nations</i>.<br><br>As the perspective shifts from watchful child, to teacher, mother, writer and citizen, <i>Bread and Circus</i> asks what it is to have survived, indeed to have flourished, and at what cost.</p>