The New Yorker’s Joshua Rothman has a smart profile<\/a> of Quart on the magazine’s site today. What she’s describing, she says, is not brand new, but it marks a disturbing and important shift:\u00a0\u201cThinking about money used to be in the background, and now it\u2019s foregrounded.\u201d<\/p>\n The story continues:<\/p>\n A few of the poems in \u201cMonetized\u201d are about the obvious subject of gentrification\u2014about walking around your old neighborhood and encountering, as Quart put it, a \u201cDanish lady with blonde pigtails, an Uppababy, and shiny sweatpants,\u201d where, twenty years ago, you might have met a leather daddy on his way to Rawhide. Quart longs for the chaotic, untidy, unpredictable New York of the seventies and eighties. But most of the poems pursue more elusive subjects: the hollow satisfactions of Internet culture (\u201c \u2018What\u2019s the point?\u2019 seeps out \/ of that hyperlink\u201d); the simultaneous pride and shame with w I’ve met Quart only once, but feel an eerie connection between her work and mine, as if she’d tapped into my thinking and translated it to the verse that I don’t know how to write. Monetized<\/em> is well worth looking at for anyone who cares about poetry, the new plutocracy, or the invisible, psychological impact of the wealth economy.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [contextly_auto_sidebar id=”fhqVn6TOLjpnLFsHnV7qvLOILjagWywW”] A NEW book of poems, Monetized, looks at our new Gilded Age, with its staggering extremes of wealth and poverty. The book\u00a0is written by the New York journalist Alissa Quart, who has written three books, the most recent of which is Republic of Outsiders. The New Yorker’s Joshua Rothman has a smart profile […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[34,48,631,90,65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-3174","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-literary","7":"category-new-york","8":"category-plutocracy","9":"category-poetry","10":"category-politics","11":"entry","12":"has-post-thumbnail"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3174","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3174"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3174\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3178,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3174\/revisions\/3178"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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<\/a>hich we approach our own consumer identities (\u201cOvernight, binging turned positive\u201d); the commercialization of self-perfection, which gives each of us, in place of a super-ego, an \u201cinternal continuous \/ improvement consultant.\u201d In many of them, Quart traces the influence of money-obsession on her own imagination. \u201cWhen you write narrative nonfiction, the dream is to get into another person\u2019s mind. With poetry, you\u2019re always already in somebody\u2019s mind\u2014it\u2019s just your own,\u201d she said. \u201cThere\u2019s that feeling where your inner life is shaped by financial concerns and values. You\u2019re sort of self-objectifying.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n