Description
Book Synopsis“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 GaitskillThoughts 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.
Trade Review“The poet laureate of the Precariat”
—Barbara Ehrenreich
“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, necessary book.”
—Karen E. Bender
“With hilarious wit and trenchant lyricism, Quart plumbs everyday experiences and late capitalism.”
—Celina Su
PRAISE FOR QUART'S POETRY:
“Dense, aphoristic, playful...”
—The New Yorker
“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.”
—NPR
“Quart turns the insecure conditions that shape our lives today into beautiful jagged verse: the poetry of careers replaced by gigs, of workplaces transformed into WeWork, of a country with no promise, ever, of simple safety.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich
“Every movement, from splicing, to condensation to litany, has an unprecedented intensity, informative politics, surprise and audacious flair.”
—Wayne Koestenbaum
“[Quart] has perfect pitch.”
—The Philadelphia Inquirer
“[Her poems] reveal her keen sociological eye and serve as remarkably apt cultural critiques.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Quart’s laser-sharp phrases...have a way of sticking around in your head long after you turn the final page.”
—Alternet
“The irony of our predicament . . . is delightfully disclosed not only in the speaker’s waggish yet tempered tone, but also in the sheer refinement of [her] free verse.”
—The Boston Review
Table of ContentsI.
Sakhalin
In Ballard
Thoughts and Prayers
Late Capitalism
Ventura
Clinic ( Jody Rogac, untitled photo of Southern clinic)
II.
Apocalypse Anyway
Pass
Pre-Natal
Coterie
Against Amnesia (Peter Hujar, “Christopher Street Pier #2 (Crossed Legs)”)
Outrageous
Ms. Things
Fever
Alphabetical America
Mammo
III.
MRI
The Harasser’s Apology
Enclave
Wedding Poem
23andMe
Cancel This
Alma Mater
The Cloud
Summer Haven
Notes
Acknowledgments
Bio
