SUSAN BRIANTE
13 Questions for the Next Economy:
New & Selected
Preorder now from Noemi Press.
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.
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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.
Praise for 13 Questions for the Next Economy
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"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 room and 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 of cool. It’s a comet tail of harrowing documents, names (Alexander Litvinenko – look him up!) and sudden pleasures – see “a skinny girl walk a long/road recently paved” who I’ve decided is Susan s-l-o-w-l-y on her way to writing this book – for her kid, and her partner, 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 of a phone call, Susan Briante presents 13 Questions for the Next Economy, a self-erasing montage. "I want whiteness to become as thin as a paycheck," notes Briante. What it would take to accomplish that becomes an imaginal labor deployed not by readers but readership itself."
—Bhanu Kapil
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"13 Questions for the Next Economy electrifies us out of our debt riddled reveries and situates 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 powerful poetry constructs a riveting tension between mothers and markets and the intriguing dynamics of their supply and demand. This is a poet who brilliantly draws upon the means of participation in these systems of late capitalism with fierce discernment and an impressive assemblage of images radiating with intellectual reference and a gnawing ardor for an equitable future."
—Raquel Gutiérrez
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"For almost 20 years, Susan Briante has been reckoning with perhaps the least poetic and most taboo (most intimate) subject of all – money. I could not admire this work, or this author, more. In 13 Questions for the Next Economy, Briante does what so many writers strive for but so few of us achieve – a poetry that is so deeply embedded in specific geographies, economies, and political/personal power struggles that the collection rises to the highest level of endurance and enduring. For the record, here is a book published in 2025 when there are approximately 14.5 billion one dollar bills in existence. For $1 you can buy a scratch off lottery ticket, 16 ounces of water, or a coin purse at the dollar store. If there is a path to revolution, it will include beauty. And it will require our reading and our action. Let us begin by inscribing Briante’s poems across the disappearing/ever present face of money."
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—TC Tolbert​​