Susan Briante, award-winning poet and chronicler of globalization, The Great Recession, and the militarization of daily life, returns with 13 Questions for the Next Economy. This visionary collection, from the author of the Poetry Foundation's Pegasus prize-winning Defacing the Monument, weaves together selections from her four previous books with arresting new poems and visuals. Across these pages, NAFTA, industrial ruins, falling market indices, and the archives of state violence form interdependent constellations. A child is born, parents die, and an economic system continues to extract its lethal toll. "Where does the riot begin?" Briante asks. Here, in poetry that charts how too-late capitalism desecrates contemporary lives. Adopting the aesthetics and the urgency of the zine, Briante's work charts interconnected constellations of economic and political systems that govern our lives. These systems (like language) leave their mark on everything. And yet, poems resist. In a perfect world, you would pick up this book from a blanket laid out on a sidewalk alongside knock-off Doc Martens, old magazines, cellophaned wrapped candy, and small bundles of wildflowers. You might not pay for it. You'd read it, make a copy, pass it on.

Susan Briante is the author of Defacing the Monument, essays on immigration, archives, aesthetics and the state, winner of the Poetry Foundation's Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism in 2021. In addition, she has written three books of poetry, most recently The Market Wonders. Her work can be found in The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Best American Poetry, and The Brooklyn Rail (among many other venues). She is a professor of creative writing at the University of Arizona, where she directs the Southwest Field Studies in Writing Program, which brings students to the US-Mexico border to collaborate with community-based environmental and social justice groups and a member of the Detained Project, a public facing archive that gathers the oral histories of formerly detained migrants and asylum seekers.

"I mean this is such an unlikely thing, an enthusiastic, tragic book. In here Susan asks(me, of all people) if she should have a kid and I reply: I think so. There's so much roomand time in here. It's a Bela Tarr kind of book, variously enquiring, summative, cunning(in the adorable sense) warning, communitarian, visionary, plain spoke, even kind ofcool. It's a comet tail of harrowing documents, names (Alexander Litvinenko - look himup!) and sudden pleasures - see 'a skinny girl walk a long/road recently paved' whoI've decided is Susan s-l-o-w-l-y on her way to writing this book - for her kid, and herpartner, and 'landers' and me. I'm honored and jazzed to be in here." — Eileen Myles

"In the long tradition of the questionnaire, encountered on a street-corner or at the end ofa phone call, Susan Briante presents 13 Questions for the Next Economy, a self-erasingmontage. 'I want whiteness to become as thin as a paycheck,' notes Briante. What itwould take to accomplish that becomes an imaginal labor deployed not by readers butreadership itself." — Bhanu Kapil

"13 Questions for a New Economy electrifies us out of our debt riddled reveries andsituates us within the economic anxieties that trouble and ignite how we love, fail,implode, and enact faith in the institutions that contour our lives. Briante's powerfulpoetry constructs a riveting tension between mothers and markets and the intriguingdynamics of their supply and demand. This is a poet who brilliantly draws upon themeans of participation in these systems of late capitalism with fierce discernment andan impressive assemblage of images radiating with intellectual reference and a gnawingardor for an equitable future." — Raquel Gutiérrez

"For almost 20 years, Susan Briante has been reckoning with perhaps the least poeticand most taboo (most intimate) subject of all - money. I could not admire this work, orthis author, more. In 13 Questions for the Next Economy, Briante does what so manywriters strive for but so few of us achieve - a poetry that is so deeply embedded inspecific geographies, economies, and political/personal power struggles that thecollection rises to the highest level of endurance and enduring. For the record, here is abook published in 2025 when there are approximately 14.5 billion one dollar bills inexistence. For $1 you can buy a scratch off lottery ticket, 16 ounces of water, or a coinpurse at the dollar store. If there is a path to revolution, it will include beauty. And it willrequire our reading and our action. Let us begin by inscribing Briante's poems acrossthe disappearing/ever present face of money." — TC Tolbert