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The Market Wonders
Poetry. In THE MARKET WONDERS, the Market itself becomes a thinking person: lover, parent, poet, philosopher. The first section reads as if the Dow Jones and the Dao De Jing had been playfully conflated; like the latter work, this is a "Book of Changes" and a work of philosophy. The speaker of these poems focuses tightly on the developing consciousness of her infant daughter, and then broadly on world events, in what they call "total awareness, incessant recording." While the timeline of the book's contents almost numbly identifies days by the closing numbers of that day's Dow, the mathematics at play are much wider than market measurements. They include theoretical physics-with the poet insisting the market penetrates all events-and brain physiology, as well as the purpose of poetry itself. Briante pushes the poetic domain beyond the lyric, beyond traditional subjects like nature (although the poet's consciousness omits nothing: cardinals in a tree, for instance), and into enumeration as meditation, money movement as an overarching shared consciousness. Briante turns the expectations of poetry upside down when she explains, "I wish more poets would write about money," and a fairytale narrated in footnotes suddenly has exact measurement thrust into it. By the end of the book, we see how financial theories, rightly or wrongly applied can distort the ordinary acts of living, impoverish entire communities. There is nothing, however, impoverished about THE MARKET WONDERS, a work rich with marvels drawn from our ordinary world.
"Across the bottom of our imported flat-screen televisions race the names of the winners and the losers: NFL and NBA scores, Dow Jones Industrial Averages, news on the most recent school shooting or celebrity overdose. Amidst this incessant flagellation of news that is incapable of staying news, Susan Briante has imagined a remarkable poetics for our post-Occupy lives. Intimate yet public, THE MARKET WONDERS creates nothing short of a new linguistic bridge between revelation and awe."—Mark Nowak
"Poetry's conventions tend to assume that poetry does not need to bother itself with the economic machinations of something like the Dow. These conventions are wrong and Susan Briante's THE MARKET WONDERS proves it. This is poetry that is only the richer for how it weaves the economics that shape our daily lives into it. This is one of the most beautiful and moving books I have read in recent years."—Juliana Spahr
"An intimate almanac of family life, Susan Briante's newest book also describes the collisions between an I and late capitalism. In this way, the market becomes a throat, a tree, a poet—it becomes the inorganic force Briante brushes and glances in her poems: 'Always a story, no matter how avant-garde you live,' a poet tells the speaker in a dream. THE MARKET WONDERS is a devastating meditation on value and love and economy, a book that asks its readers to pay careful heed of the markets' inescapable trespass into our interior lives. This book is not just stunning, it's also important, a clarion call."—Carmen Giménez Smith
"Across the bottom of our imported flat-screen televisions race the names of the winners and the losers: NFL and NBA scores, Dow Jones Industrial Averages, news on the most recent school shooting or celebrity overdose. Amidst this incessant flagellation of news that is incapable of staying news, Susan Briante has imagined a remarkable poetics for our post-Occupy lives. Intimate yet public, THE MARKET WONDERS creates nothing short of a new linguistic bridge between revelation and awe."—Mark Nowak
"Poetry's conventions tend to assume that poetry does not need to bother itself with the economic machinations of something like the Dow. These conventions are wrong and Susan Briante's THE MARKET WONDERS proves it. This is poetry that is only the richer for how it weaves the economics that shape our daily lives into it. This is one of the most beautiful and moving books I have read in recent years."—Juliana Spahr
"An intimate almanac of family life, Susan Briante's newest book also describes the collisions between an I and late capitalism. In this way, the market becomes a throat, a tree, a poet—it becomes the inorganic force Briante brushes and glances in her poems: 'Always a story, no matter how avant-garde you live,' a poet tells the speaker in a dream. THE MARKET WONDERS is a devastating meditation on value and love and economy, a book that asks its readers to pay careful heed of the markets' inescapable trespass into our interior lives. This book is not just stunning, it's also important, a clarion call."—Carmen Giménez Smith
- GenresPoetry
116 pages, Paperback
Published February 22, 2016
1 person is currently reading
66 people want to read
About the author
Susan Briante
12 books36 followersSusan Briante was born in Newark, NJ, after the riots. The author of the book, Pioneers in the Study of Motion (Ahsahta Press, 2007), Briante now lives in Dallas with the poet Farid Matuk.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
February 21, 2017
“On the day William Carlos Williams died the Dow closed up 667,” Susan Briante points out in The Market Wonders. “The Dow closed down 1130 on the day Prince released Purple Rain.” The inverse pathetic fallacy that she invokes—as per the poetic tradition, the Dow, imbued with human emotion, should rise and fall in accordance with the ups and downs of human events—serves to underscore an important truth: the stock market is inhuman, despite the paradoxical fact that it can make or break hundreds of millions of lives. Her theme really hits home when, after she lists a litany of ostensibly random dates and numbers at which the Dow opened and closed in 2014, Briante writes: “On each one of those days in 2014 one unarmed person of color . . . was killed in the custody of police according to information released by the NAACP in late 2014.” On each one of those days, sometimes the Dow went up, sometimes it went down. The point is, the market was indifferent; it didn’t care. “The Dow rises and sinks, floats like oil on the surface of a sea,” Briante observes—toxic, cold, and superficial.
The Market Wonders feels like a meditation on the indifference—even the cruelty—of calculation and numerical valuation. Numbers, numbers, numbers—they seem to define our existence and frame almost every aspect of our lives, and yet they are essentially lifeless. “Can I feel these numbers in my hands?” Briante wonders. In a myriad of sometimes subtle, sometimes obvious ways, Briante comments upon the perils of calculation at the expense of meditation, cold reason at the expense of heartfelt contemplation. In one poignant entry, she contrasts the hyper-rational computations of the market with motherly affection: “My love for my daughter is dumb and simple / all of my feeling focused, funneled.” In “Ticker,” an artful, if somewhat impenetrable poem that runs like a stock ticker across the bottom of almost the entire book, she states flatly that “numbers kill and crowd, dive and ascend, stick like nettles, like burrs on my skirt sewn by some teenage girls in a foreign country with only the language of numbers.” Briante’s distaste for numerical valuation feels right, especially after a drawn-out campaign season and election in which numerical predictions proved erroneous. Numbers, it seems, consistently fail to tell our most human stories.
In her notes at the end of the collection, Briante explains that she wrote The Market Wonders as a response to the financial crisis and Great Recession. She describes the book as a lyrical exploration of her own lived experience of the crisis and its catastrophic aftermath, when stock markets tumbled and foreclosed homes lined the streets of many American communities. In a lecture I had the pleasure to attend, Briante told us that it was at this critical economic moment when she noticed we often talk about the market as if it were a person; the market “rallies,” it “worries” and “hesitates.” This inspired her to personify the market in many of her poems; “The Dow Jones was my Muse,” she said. And even if she felt it was this distant creature, removed from the non-calculative realm of her poetic life, it was nevertheless woven intricately into her daily routine. This realization motivated the final prose poem of The Market Wonders—“Mother is Marxist.” It is her best entry.
“Mother is Marxist” beautifully captures the fundamentally defiant attitude a mother adopts toward the market, which seeks to ascribe children with monetary value and exploit the affections of the mother-child relationship. “Mother is not a biological or relational subject position,” Briante writes, “but can be an attitude of resistance before the market.” A mother exposes “as false and pernicious the mystification of capitalist instantiations of value, promiscuous relations of value and their violence.” This is beautifully philosophical stuff. It also strikes at a truth about mothers and motherhood so often underappreciated, if even mentioned at all. And Briante’s poetic analysis penetrates even deeper. Not every mother, she says, has the same capacity for resistance. “Many parents may want to register and respond to the values the market places on their child, but a parent’s own depressed value may leave her with scant time to challenge market valuations of her children, child, self.” She then notes how she feels her own “depressed value as a woman” and her “surplus value as a white ethnic.” These are further iniquities that the market fails to account for; in fact, once more, it doesn’t seem to care much at all about such petty structural injustices. “Mother is Marxist” is therefore the climax of Briante’s meditation on the cruelty of cold calculation and market valuation. “The market scans my child, calculates pecuniary value,” she observes. Must we accept this passive stance toward the market and its methods?
Toward the end of the lecture I went to, Professor Briante said that the intersection between the market and politics has become a one-way street toward profit maximization and exploitation. Her poetry reflects this serious concern: “You can hear the swish of dollars washing down the sewer line, second by second, you can hear the stock ticker ticking away.” To be sure, Professor Briante’s poetry is beautiful. Beyond this, however, it calls upon us to radically reconceive the way we think about markets, our relationship with them, and our complicity with rampant economic exploitation. In “Mother is Marxist,” Briante writes:
The Market Wonders feels like a meditation on the indifference—even the cruelty—of calculation and numerical valuation. Numbers, numbers, numbers—they seem to define our existence and frame almost every aspect of our lives, and yet they are essentially lifeless. “Can I feel these numbers in my hands?” Briante wonders. In a myriad of sometimes subtle, sometimes obvious ways, Briante comments upon the perils of calculation at the expense of meditation, cold reason at the expense of heartfelt contemplation. In one poignant entry, she contrasts the hyper-rational computations of the market with motherly affection: “My love for my daughter is dumb and simple / all of my feeling focused, funneled.” In “Ticker,” an artful, if somewhat impenetrable poem that runs like a stock ticker across the bottom of almost the entire book, she states flatly that “numbers kill and crowd, dive and ascend, stick like nettles, like burrs on my skirt sewn by some teenage girls in a foreign country with only the language of numbers.” Briante’s distaste for numerical valuation feels right, especially after a drawn-out campaign season and election in which numerical predictions proved erroneous. Numbers, it seems, consistently fail to tell our most human stories.
In her notes at the end of the collection, Briante explains that she wrote The Market Wonders as a response to the financial crisis and Great Recession. She describes the book as a lyrical exploration of her own lived experience of the crisis and its catastrophic aftermath, when stock markets tumbled and foreclosed homes lined the streets of many American communities. In a lecture I had the pleasure to attend, Briante told us that it was at this critical economic moment when she noticed we often talk about the market as if it were a person; the market “rallies,” it “worries” and “hesitates.” This inspired her to personify the market in many of her poems; “The Dow Jones was my Muse,” she said. And even if she felt it was this distant creature, removed from the non-calculative realm of her poetic life, it was nevertheless woven intricately into her daily routine. This realization motivated the final prose poem of The Market Wonders—“Mother is Marxist.” It is her best entry.
“Mother is Marxist” beautifully captures the fundamentally defiant attitude a mother adopts toward the market, which seeks to ascribe children with monetary value and exploit the affections of the mother-child relationship. “Mother is not a biological or relational subject position,” Briante writes, “but can be an attitude of resistance before the market.” A mother exposes “as false and pernicious the mystification of capitalist instantiations of value, promiscuous relations of value and their violence.” This is beautifully philosophical stuff. It also strikes at a truth about mothers and motherhood so often underappreciated, if even mentioned at all. And Briante’s poetic analysis penetrates even deeper. Not every mother, she says, has the same capacity for resistance. “Many parents may want to register and respond to the values the market places on their child, but a parent’s own depressed value may leave her with scant time to challenge market valuations of her children, child, self.” She then notes how she feels her own “depressed value as a woman” and her “surplus value as a white ethnic.” These are further iniquities that the market fails to account for; in fact, once more, it doesn’t seem to care much at all about such petty structural injustices. “Mother is Marxist” is therefore the climax of Briante’s meditation on the cruelty of cold calculation and market valuation. “The market scans my child, calculates pecuniary value,” she observes. Must we accept this passive stance toward the market and its methods?
Toward the end of the lecture I went to, Professor Briante said that the intersection between the market and politics has become a one-way street toward profit maximization and exploitation. Her poetry reflects this serious concern: “You can hear the swish of dollars washing down the sewer line, second by second, you can hear the stock ticker ticking away.” To be sure, Professor Briante’s poetry is beautiful. Beyond this, however, it calls upon us to radically reconceive the way we think about markets, our relationship with them, and our complicity with rampant economic exploitation. In “Mother is Marxist,” Briante writes:
“Often the day after hearing gunfire from my bedroom . . . I would scan the Internet looking for some piece of news to link to the sounds. I never found mention of a shootout or injury or killing.Briante’s poetry has obvious ethical undertones. In effect, she asks her readers, “How can we, as people with lives outside the market, be better?” “The poem is a high-risk investment, a long-term commitment,” Briante at one point explains. “Like a big dirty city, it should make you feel / a little uncomfortable.”
The gunshots existed as fragments in a storyline that seemed to have no relation to me, a non sequitur, a piece of conversation overheard in a language in which I had no fluency.
But those metaphors are wrong.
My legislative representatives cannot or will not pass gun control policy, my tax dollars support the purchase of surplus military equipment by police. The white imaginary criminalizes non-white bodies.”
November 20, 2016
"The market wonders where the soul goes" says Susan Briante, this book wanders and wonders about what seems to rule our lives: the dow. The mechanics of economy and life and death and everything else becomes an excus for poetry to meditate. This is a meditation that needs a calculator and a soul willing to bet.
October 29, 2025
What a thought-provoking collection. Despite the varied nature of topics, both personal and at-large, the poet did an excellent job at nodding her head towards her main through line through several images (golden leaf, her daughter, power lines, trees, etc.) and distinct patterns. I love how generative of a practice her taking the hard-form, closing number of the Dow was and how she wove it with a more intuitive practice by letting it guide her to numerology and other texts/Bartlett’s quotations. I do wish that “Mother is Marxist” was longer because the granular topics of racial violence and systemic brutality is an intriguing one.
April 20, 2021
I loved how the speaker was talking to the market, how the market represented itself and also the speaker and also other people the speaker discussed and just the state of the world in general. I love numbers and technical things. Double meanings. This book had a lot of that. Sometimes there were two poems happening at once that told different but related stories.
June 8, 2017
Maybe the most powerful 'fuck' in our contemporary poetry. So good.
September 9, 2023
An unusual blend of lyric, realism, and numbers-- so much like every day 21st century life as dominated by market forces and digital culture. And then you land in "Mother Is Marxist" where the realism is overwhelming. Pecuniary value of children, education dollars, military surplus sold to police– which Briante renders vividly, viscerally. Suddenly you're not immersed in cubism as a new form but Guernica as a mirror. Months after reading this collection, I'm still thinking about it.
June 23, 2018
It is so rare to read poetry about money, but Briante has approached the subject with deft and deep language to make engaging, new poetry. She shows how entrenched we are in the wonder of the market, how haunting and human it is, and how alien and potent.
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November 3, 2017811.6 B8493m 2016
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews