Civic poetry is public poetry. It is often political poetry. It is about the hard stuff of life: money, crime, gender, corporate excess, racial injustice. Alissa Quart's new book Monetized and Idra Novey's Exit, Civilian are two such books, one inspired by being a journalist covering inequality in the aftermath of the financial crisis, the other by working directly with incarcerated populations.
Idra Novey is the author of Exit, Civilian, selected by Patricia Smith for the 2011 National Poetry Series, The Next Country, a finalist for the 2008 Foreword Book of the Year Award in poetry, and most recently Clarice: The Visitor, a collaboration with the artist Erica Baum. Her poetry has been featured on NPR's All Things Considered and in Slate, The Paris Review, and Poetry, which selected her poems for the 2013 Friends of Literature Award. Her debut novel Ways to Disappear is forthcoming from Little, Brown in 2016. She teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University.
Alissa Quart's first book of poetry, Monetized, has just been published by Miami University Press. Her poetry has also 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). 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.
New Yorker Feature on Quart and "Monetized": http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/alissa-quart-money-poet