Thoughts And Prayers

“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
$12.00

Adding to cart… The item has been added
  • 92 pages
  • Paperback ISBN 9781682192160
  • E-book ISBN 9781682192207

about the book

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.


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

About The Author / Editor

Photo © Ash Fox Alissa Quart is the executive director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. She is the author of the poetry collection Monetized and four non-fiction books: Squeezed: Why Our Families Can’t Afford America, Republic of Outsiders, Hothouse Kids, and Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers. Her poems have appeared in Granta, the London Review of Books, and The Nation, among many other publications. She writes The Guardian’s “Outclassed” column and contributes to a range of publications including The New York Times and The New York Review of Books.

Read An Excerpt

An excerpt from Sakhalin

I. Sanctuary Island, Sakhalin, a Russian penal colony. Anton Chekhov traveled here by rail, long months from Moscow, tubercular. Took a transcendent census of inmates, freedmen, annexes, forests then burdocks, nettles. Tragic beautiful accounting. The Better, the Verst. The people counted not named elsewhere: The Oroks, the Nivkhs. 58 living residents, 40 houses. No ideas but in things. No things but in numbers.

Americans went Wild West. O Pioneers. Sioux. Russians had Wild East. Meet the Ainu. Koreans were also coerced to Sakhalin. They appear in my small grey Penguin edition of Chekhov’s Sakhalin about his time in this prison wilderness,a Russian Turner thesis.A Second Life.

My media prison, Manhattan island. The digital interface, my rattling train, with games of whack-a-mole, defaced Jewish cemeteries, hackers, bad billionaires. Feed after feed. Russia throwing elections to Trump’s golden tower. Census and OSHA numbers horribly pretty. 49,000 retail workers have repetitive stress disability.

Chekhov in Sakhalin briefly exchanged the T.B. that would kill him for the participle, innocent men hanging in a Siberian wilderness. All data, all unaccountable.

I write the whole 19th century was poverty porn.

in the media

Thoughts And Prayers

“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
$12.00

Add to Cart

Adding to cart… The item has been added

about the book

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.


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

About The Author / Editor

Photo © Ash Fox Alissa Quart is the executive director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. She is the author of the poetry collection Monetized and four non-fiction books: Squeezed: Why Our Families Can’t Afford America, Republic of Outsiders, Hothouse Kids, and Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers. Her poems have appeared in Granta, the London Review of Books, and The Nation, among many other publications. She writes The Guardian’s “Outclassed” column and contributes to a range of publications including The New York Times and The New York Review of Books.

Read An Excerpt

An excerpt from Sakhalin

I. Sanctuary Island, Sakhalin, a Russian penal colony. Anton Chekhov traveled here by rail, long months from Moscow, tubercular. Took a transcendent census of inmates, freedmen, annexes, forests then burdocks, nettles. Tragic beautiful accounting. The Better, the Verst. The people counted not named elsewhere: The Oroks, the Nivkhs. 58 living residents, 40 houses. No ideas but in things. No things but in numbers.

Americans went Wild West. O Pioneers. Sioux. Russians had Wild East. Meet the Ainu. Koreans were also coerced to Sakhalin. They appear in my small grey Penguin edition of Chekhov’s Sakhalin about his time in this prison wilderness,a Russian Turner thesis.A Second Life.

My media prison, Manhattan island. The digital interface, my rattling train, with games of whack-a-mole, defaced Jewish cemeteries, hackers, bad billionaires. Feed after feed. Russia throwing elections to Trump’s golden tower. Census and OSHA numbers horribly pretty. 49,000 retail workers have repetitive stress disability.

Chekhov in Sakhalin briefly exchanged the T.B. that would kill him for the participle, innocent men hanging in a Siberian wilderness. All data, all unaccountable.

I write the whole 19th century was poverty porn.

in the media