Going for Broke: Living on the Edge in the World’s Richest Country

Economic injustice takes center stage in this mixed bag gathered by Quart, executive director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project (Bootstrapped), and managing director Wallis (Killed). The essays, poems, and photographs are “a testament to American life during the lingering pandemic,” Quart writes in her introduction, “with its consequent exacerbated inequality.” “I Did My Own Abortion Because Texas Used COVID-19 as an Excuse to Shut Down Abortion Clinics” is a striking anonymous account of the precarity of reproductive rights, while “I Grew Up Without a Fixed Address” by Bobbi Dempsey is a moving look at what it’s like to apply for a grant having lived in “an estimated seventy places before I graduated high school” due to poverty. Some of the pieces feel a bit out of place: Elizabeth Gollen’s “In the Pandemic, Cooking Connected Me to My Ancestors,” which lacks the gravity of other essays, bemoans postpandemic changes at the Park Slope Food Coop in Brooklyn, while Joe Ford’s “Why I Choose to Live House-Free in Alaska” seems to poke fun at the same homelessness the rest of the collection takes seriously. (“I don’t want a flock of freakin’ hobos descending on the area like an invasive species,” he writes, explaining why he won’t reveal the exact location of his campsite.) Though the quality varies, there’s plenty of powerful vulnerability in these personal accounts. (Oct.)