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. "Thea Matthews is our sacred underground; the only host of our ascension."—Tongo Eisen-Martin, author of Blood on the Fog 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