Monetized

ALISSA QUART

2015. ISBN 978-1-881163-56-5
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Alissa Quart’s first book of poetry 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. Quart, the acclaimed author of Branded and two other books of reported cultural criticism, cuts into our clamorous culture, summoning its strangeness and humor. 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 & Such

• Jeanine Deibel’s microreview appeared in the Boston Review March/April 2016 issue: “With finger on the pulse of cultural currency, Monetized marks Alissa Quart’s poetic debut, following successes in nonfiction and journalism.”

• Poetry Society of America‘s “In Their Own Words” reprinted “Palm Springs At the End of the Mind” and Alissa Quart’s thoughts on the poem’s genesis in November 2015.

• Publishers Weekly reviewed Monetized on June 1, 2015: “Quart’s lyric poems… reveal her keen sociological eye and serve as remarkably apt cultural critiques.”

• The Philadelphia Inquirer ran a micro review of Monetized by Frank Wilson on May 24, 2015: “When it comes to the sound of today, she has perfect pitch.”

• Alissa Quart annotated “Channeling” for the May/June issue of Columbia Journalism Review.
  
• Kara Bloomgaren-Smoke’s piece about Alissa Quart and Monetized appeared in The New York Observer on April 21, 2015. 

• In Joshua Rothman’s April 8, 2015 profile of Alissa Quart for The New Yorker, he praised the “dense, playful, aphoristic poems” in Monetized.

• The Offing reprinted “Girls I Have Loved” and “Strong Copies” on April 2, 2015.

• Nieman Reports interviewed Alissa Quart and reprinted “Instrumental” on March 25, 2015.

• New York Magazine included Monetized in the highbrow/brilliant quadrant of The Approval Matrix: Week of March 23, 2015.

• The Awl reprinted “Womanized” on March 19, 2015.

• Lynn Stuart Parramore micro reviewed Monetized for the Alternet on February 24, 2015.

• Alissa Quart’s essay, “News of Poetry” appeared in The Writer Magazine on February 19, 2015.

• Ninety-nine cent stores, Slimfast, Amtrak, ‘Twitter Dead Souls,’ James Caan films and Matt Dillon posters: Alissa Quart’s poems form a brilliant ‘check list of American self-destruction,’ exploring the absence and dreams of escape that mark the modern landscape.
  —Barbara Ehrenreich

• Alissa Quart’s smart and sexy poems perform invasion and insurgency with utmost aplomb and analytical edge. I love her intensity, her compact lines, her clever harvesting of commerce’s schizoid hysteria, as if media-speak’s carnival (Times Square, the Internet) were reorchestrated, with tidy wit and formalist ingenuity, by a Bauhaus purist.
  —Wayne Koestenbaum

• The poems in Alissa Quart’s Monetized are not only smart but ambitious as hell. Sharp, biting, and aphoristic, Quart’s exact and exacting lines are extraordinary shots in and at our commodified American landscape. (‘Let’s hope we’re perennial.’) With their constant awareness of the dissonance found in this post-millennial tweet-filled, Facebook-ed, facsimile age of late capitalism, these poems convey a powerful sense of lost and found awareness: ‘We could forgive ourselves / if only we knew our own story.
  —Susan Howe

• It’s pretty unusual, it’s almost unheard of, for poems to feature both the subtlest and most intricate word play and a pure, fierce, tell-it-like-it-is voice, as these poems do. They are stealthily virtuosic.
  —Louis Menand

About the Author

Alissa Quart’s poetry has appeared in the London Review of Books, The Awl, Fence, Open City, Feminist Studies, and many other publications, as well as in her poetry chapbook Solarized. She is the author of three non- fiction books: Branded (Basic Books, 2003), Hothouse Kids (Penguin Press, 2006), and Republic of Outsiders: The Power of Amateurs, Dreamers and Rebels (The New Press, 2013). Her nonfiction titles have been translated into 14 languages. She has written features for The New York Times Magazine, Elle, The Atlantic, The Nation, and many other magazines and has contributed frequent reported opinion pieces to The New York Times and elsewhere. With Barbara Ehrenreich, she is editor of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, a non-profit that supports journalism about inequality. She wrote and produced the Emmy-nominated multimedia project “The Last Clinic” for The Atavist. She has taught at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism among other universities and was a 2010 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University.