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.

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.

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.

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.