Monetized

Book excerpt: Poetry. 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." "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"