“Alissa Quart is a keen observer of our culture and a believer in the power of poetry to cut to the heart of issues around us: money, class, gender and the environment.”
Thoughts and Prayers
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.
REVIEWS OF thoughts and prayers
Nov. 2019 | "'Thoughts And Prayers' Author On How To Recover The Meaning Of Words We Use Again And Again," NPR’s Here & Now
Oct. 2019 | "The Ukraine Whistleblower's Complaint: A Poem," The Daily Beast
Oct. 2019 | "'Thoughts and Prayers' Are Killing Us," Teen Vogue
Sep. 2019 | "Alissa Quart | Thoughts and Prayers," Strand Bookstore’s YouTube Channel
Sep. 2019 | "So You've Been Cancelled," PRX’s To The Best of Our Knowledge at Wisconsin Public Radio
Monetized
Reflecting on money, aging, motherhood, work, the Internet, the eighties, nostalgia, journalism, and New York, Alissa Quart's first book of poetry, Monetized, sifts brilliantly through our landscape of damaged Americana. From spam ads to tech speak, from self-help to real estate to the lingo of gossip or "mom" sites, these poems insistently limn a country where nearly everything has taken on the character of money. Monetized also reflects upon a shared longing for the analogue era, as well as our longing for a less commercialized past. This book is a remarkable account of a state of yearning for the passing moment in a period of rapid acceleration, a feeling Quart calls "right-now-nostalgia."
Reviews of Monetized
Apr. 2016 | "Monetized Microreview," Boston Review
Jun. 2015 | Publishers Weekly on Monetized
May 2015 | "Alissa Quart's 'Monetized': perfect pitch for the present," The Philadelphia Inquirer
Apr. 2015 | "New Poetry Collection Depicts the Decline of Legacy Media" The New York Observer
Apr. 2015 | "The Money Poet," The New Yorker
Mar. 2015 | "Slate Money: The Literary Edition," Slate
Mar. 2015 | "Brilliant" and "highbrow" quadrant of the Approval Matrix, New York Magazine
Feb. 2015 | "Feel Like Your Life Has Become Monetized? You’re Not Alone," Alternet
“Dense, aphoristic, playful... [the poems examine] the hollow satisfactions of Internet culture (“ ‘What’s the point?’ seeps out / of that hyperlink”); the simultaneous pride and shame with which we approach our own consumer identities (“Overnight, binging turned positive”); the commercialization of self-perfection...”
“When it comes to the sound of today, [Quart] has perfect pitch.”
“[This] new volume of sensitive and searing poems plumbs the depths of what it is to be alive and adrift in a sea of commercial transactions. Quart’s laser-sharp phrases...have a way of sticking around in your head long after you turn the final page.”
Poems
Jun. 2022 | "How Long Can the Heart Go On Breaking? Three Poems of Gun Violence in America," Literary Hub
May 2022 | "“Women afraid of dying while / they are trying to find their life.” Poetry of Abortion by Alissa Quart," Literary Hub
Aug. 2019 | "‘Late Capitalism,’ a Prose Poem by Alissa Quart," Literary Hub
May 2015 | "Channeling," Columbia Journalism Review
Apr. 2015 | "Girls I Have Loved" and "Strong Copies," Los Angeles Review of Books' The Offing
Mar. 2015 | "Womanized," The Awl
Feb. 2014 | "Solarised," London Review of Books
Aug. 2013 | "Instrumental," The Awl
Nov. 2012 | "Degrees," The Awl
Aug. 2012 | "Protocol," London Review of Books
Aug. 2012 | "Driftwood," London Review of Books
Jul. 2012 | "Views," The Awl