Buy This Book
|
Paperback: $12/£10  |
E-book: $10/£8 |
Print + E-book: $16/£13 |
About the Book
“You walk into Thoughts and Prayers like it’s a familiar pop cultural fun house—then you get drawn into one of the mirrors and find you’re actually deep in someplace very real: fleshy, frightening, full of anguished intelligence and bitter fun.” —Mary Gaitskill
“Alissa Quart’s poems are nimble and seething, capturing our baroquely scurrilous world. She writes across the holes of what’s been lost, hopeless and strangely optimistic at once.”
—Eileen Myles
“Quart’s poems have impeccable technique and pleasure-giving verve. A book of grit, danger, and paradoxical elegance.” —Wayne Koestenbaum
Thoughts and Prayers is a beautiful and startling volume of poetry about our political existence. With both humor and luminosity, it gets at the personal and collective emotional experience of American public life, from the 1970s to the 1990s Democrats, through the collapse of the news industry, to the burlesque Trump era.
92 pages • Paperback ISBN 978-1-68219-216-0 • E-book 978-1-68219-220-7
About the Author
Alissa Quart is the executive director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. She is the author of the poetry collection Monetized and four non-fiction books: Squeezed: Why Our Families Can’t Afford America, Republic of Outsiders, Hothouse Kids, and Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers. Her poems have appeared in Granta, the London Review of Books, and The Nation, among many other publications. She writes The Guardian’s “Outclassed” column and contributes to a range of publications including The New York Times and The New York Review of Books.
Read an Excerpt
An excerpt from Sakhalin
I.
Sanctuary Island, Sakhalin,
a Russian penal colony.
Anton Chekhov traveled
here by rail, long
months from Moscow,
tubercular. Took
a transcendent census
of inmates, freedmen,
annexes, forests then
burdocks, nettles.
Tragic beautiful accounting.
The Better, the Verst.
The people counted not
named elsewhere:
The Oroks, the Nivkhs.
58 living residents,
40 houses.
No ideas but in things.
No things but in numbers.
Americans went Wild
West. O Pioneers.
Sioux. Russians had
Wild East. Meet the Ainu.
Koreans were also
coerced to Sakhalin.
They appear in my
small grey Penguin
edition of Chekhov’s Sakhalin
about his time in this prison
wilderness,a Russian Turner
thesis.A Second Life.
My media prison,
Manhattan island.
The digital interface,
my rattling train, with games
of whack-a-mole, defaced
Jewish cemeteries, hackers,
bad billionaires. Feed
after feed. Russia throwing
elections to Trump’s golden tower.
Census and OSHA numbers
horribly pretty.
49,000 retail workers have
repetitive stress disability.
Chekhov in Sakhalin
briefly exchanged the T.B.
that would kill him for
the participle, innocent
men hanging in
a Siberian wilderness.
All data, all
unaccountable.
I write
the whole 19th century
was poverty porn.
No ideas but in things.
No ideas but in numbers.
In the Media
- “This complex, moving poem… captures both the determined resistance and the fatalism of women trying to get some control over their lives” — Alissa Quart’s THOUGHTS AND PRAYERS excerpted in Literary Hub (5/25/2022)
- “Covid cut the red tape for welfare benefits. Let’s keep it that way” — THOUGHTS AND PRAYERS author Alissa Quart writes for The Washington Post (4/14/2022)
- “The Poetry of Labor: On Rodrigo Toscano and the Art of Work” — THOUGHTS AND PRAYERS author Alissa Quart writes for Literary Hub (3/14/2022)
- “The American dream of the middle class isn’t what it used to be” — THOUGHTS AND PRAYERS author Alissa Quart speaks with CNBC (2/24/2022)
- “How we can truly repay our frontline health workers: clear their debts” — THOUGHTS AND PRAYERS author Alissa Quart writes with Astra Taylor and Brittany M Powell for the Guardian (7/22/2020)
- “I’d never judge someone else for not working. But if I myself didn’t work, work, work, without slumping into psychic extremes I castigated myself as a corrupted failure.”—Alissa Quart, author of THOUGHTS AND PRAYERS, discuss her work in Poetry Society of America (1/10/2020)
- “I believe that Quart’s work in the so-called abstract cultural superstructure is not opposed to, but rather, at the very least, a necessary complement, to physically trying to unarm a rabid white supremacist terrorist.”—Alissa Quart’s THOUGHTS AND PRAYERS reviewed in Entropy Mag (12/6/2019)
- “In the last seven years or so, resilience has become a programming imperative for large philanthropies, including the Hogg Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and many others. Resilience has also become a theory to explain the good — from countries that adapt well to climate change to what allows some to survive addiction.”—Alissa Quart, author of THOUGHTS ON PRAYERS, writes in The Boston Globe (11/14/2019)
- “How To Recover The Meaning Of Words We Use Again And Again”–Alissa Quart, author of THOUGHTS ON PRAYERS, WBUR’s Here and Now (11/1/2019)
- “Should we be surprised about a link between the highest levels of our political world and our most acclaimed poetry? I don’t think so — and I think we should get ready for more of it, because it’s coming and we need it, desperately. “–an op-ed by Alissa Quart, author of THOUGHTS AND PRAYERS, in The New York Times (10/23/2019)
- “The poetry of the EHRP portfolios reflects contemporary poets’ burgeoning engagement with the genre of documentary poetics.”–Alissa Quart and The Economic Hardship Project profiled in Poets & Writers (10/22/2019)
- ‘How To Make “Thoughts And Prayers” Meaningful’ an interview with Alissa Quart, author of Thoughts and Prayers, published in NYLON (10/9/2019)
- ‘Thoughts and Prayers’ Are Killing Us, an excerpt from Thoughts and Prayers by Alissa Quart published in Teen Vogue (10/1/2019)
- David Berman memorialized in the New York Review of Books by Alissa Quart, author of Thoughts and Prayers (9/12/2019)
- “Let’s push the language of journalism past its limits”—an op-ed by Alissa Quart featuring an excerpt from her book Thoughts and Prayers in Columbia Journalism Review (9/6/2019)
