Thoughts and Prayers

by Alissa Quart

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.

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“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

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction

120 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2019

About the author

Alissa Quart is the executive editor of the journalism non-profit Economic Hardship Reporting Project. She co-founded its current incarnation with Barbara Ehrenreich. She is also the author of four previous acclaimed books, “Branded,’’ “Republic of Outsiders,’’ “Hothouse Kids’’ and the poetry book “Monetized.’’ She writes the Outclassed column for The Guardian and has published features and reported commentary in many magazines and newspapers, most recently for The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Nation and The New York Review of Books. She has won the Columbia Journalism School’s 2018 Alumni Award and the LA Press Club Award for Commentary, was a 2010 Nieman fellow at Harvard University, and has been nominated for an Emmy and a National Magazine Award.

Reviews

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

A thoughtful, often stirring collection by a poet better known for her journalism about economic hardship. That experience shows in this collection - the title poem is words clipped from politicians and spokespersons' statements after mass shootings. The most resonant poems, though, are the ones that link her personally reconciling her happiness, marriage, and children, with the state of the world.

[Bryan Fox · Rating 4 out of 5]

Raw, evocative, and timely poems, combining elements of personal observation, sound bite, and news into collage pieces that would work very well read live. A concise lyrical prose encapsulation of New York, of America, and of the second decade of the 21st Century.