Debt Ritual – Katie Naughton

[BUNNY/Fonograf; 2025]

Some years ago, a writer between graduate programs found a way to relieve the burden of the debt she had incurred in her life thus far. (Devoting to writing had not been a lucrative profession.) A short stint as a paralegal dealing, perhaps perversely, with corporate debt might have done the trick somewhere else, but in the “money city” that is New York, she would have to drum up more support. She would call it “a walk without money.” It would begin as a game and end up as a ritual: a debt ritual.

Some years later, as a PhD candidate, the young writer would find that Buffalo, though New York state’s second largest city, is “outside the power, money, culture of New York.” In her chapbook Study (above/ground press, 2021), she would note how: 

New York is an outside city, where everyone lives so far from each other and in small and crappy apartments, so you leave them, walk to the train, meet someone in a bar or a restaurant. People have the money to go out; you get the sense that something might happen when you’re out that couldn’t happen when you’re in.

In her books, writer Katie Naughton, through the poetic form and reference, asks: How can you be part of public life? To what extent does public life have to exist for you to take part in it without money? Earning her graduate stipend as a teaching assistant, the writer learned about primal myths, read Durkheim, filtered her material concerns through theories of language, abstraction, and Marxist theory. But what was money? Was money ‘real’—or was it something else? 

Naughton’s newest chapbook Debt Ritual (BUNNY/Fonograf) skirts the easy relatability of debt in our culture, past the land of the malls, through the sensory thicket of scents at all prices, and into quieter, more complicated territory. Part of a larger project, Debt Ritual was published in February 2025, and is Naughton’s fourth longform project. Coming out at a time where news stories cover the various degrees of depravity that constitute the project of “government efficiencies,” Debt Ritual lays bare how debt and memory become competing categories, one negative, the other fulsome; how debt can be a yoke, a lifestyle, an arbiter of chosen paths and sensory experiences. It shows how debt can be edifying in certain aspects—how it may bring up a grief that drives you to theory, to reading, to writing a poem in conversation with all that grief that came before you, in the relentless march of the dehumanizing logic of capital and every writer that has willingly or less willingly prostrated themselves under the boot as either inevitable fate or as deviant benediction. 

In a conversation with Naughton, she tells me that her debt ritual “set up an equivalence between money and participation in the world.” In her chapbook, she destabilizes this relationship, questioning how art can provide social capital without the trappings of wealth. The text not only charts personal and economic precariousness but also challenges the very rituals of finance—inviting readers to reconsider the boundaries between individual experience and systemic control.

I’ve been told that Debt Ritual is in the shape of a dollar bill, but so many places I frequent are “cash-free” these days—a slim bound, pistachio-green book that fits over my forearm, to me it resembles more a cheque book, a promise of a promise, but this may be a loose connection to how capital is what you have, and debt is what you don’t, and how I’ve venerated the dollar into becoming the real. Memory, she says, is its own form of ritual. Treating it as real makes it real. Debt is a temporal relationship between yourself and your means—that’s where memory comes into play. You pay for something you want now. Debt comes with its own class—“classy” debt, like education debt, carries a different valence than say, credit card debt.

A series of odes to material culture and social structures, Debt Ritual is a project through which the writer is working out questions increasingly fundamental to the vocation of writing—especially that of class positionality, when the precariousness associated with artmaking without generational wealth appears to be a choice, not a calling. Precariousness is often connected with the Marxist concept of the reserve army of labor: of a workforce quite sensible that it is not irreplaceable. Unlike the proletariat, the precariat—a neologism that has a nice mouthfeel which embodies both intellectual and manual workers—is unable to unionize, mobilize, or achieve stability. The quicksand of the economy is liable to engulf the precariat just as it promises the ability to rise and take with it the fortunes of those who are reliant on fate despite best laid plans or well trodden paths.  

“Why write a poem when you could engage in political action—or at the very least, write an essay?” Naughton asks with a suggestion of roguishness. 

She tells me about her concerned ambivalence to the precarity of writing. “I am always struggling with what the point of art is,” she says, as we are sitting huddled in the corner of a ritzy Crown Heights – maybe now, Prospect Heights – bar. “These poems that stand in for the world…why would anyone do that?” Naughton is nonetheless a writer, beholden to poetic expression as a calling, an urge. She frames this historically, as an elementary form of religious life, a tool to work out unsolvable problems, and perhaps come up with a strategy. We look around us, at the careful aesthetic, at the unconcerned people throwing their heads back as they drink $18 cocktails, and I am a bit distressed. “Money’s trick is that it pretends that it is all there is,” she tells me. My distress is transformed, just like that. 

As writers armed with PhDs and MFAs throng to adjunct work – if they’re half-lucky – works like Debt Ritual seem especially urgent. That is to say when I first read Debt Ritual, I felt that I had engaged with a pure truth. It contained equal measures of pain and pleasure, experience and collective imagination. 

The author learns about money through material culture — through pants, in poem “Debt Ritual: Nantucket”:

There was something I did not know about money until
college
until Nantucket pants in pastel chino with whale appliques
worn seriously walking past in the dining hall to go out
Friday Night
but that’s money that’s pants that’s signification

I read this poem with a friend who once invited me to visit his family’s house on Martha’s Vineyard. At the time, he perhaps could not understand how curious I found the place, all the white men in their salmon pink shorts, though now we laugh at our recognition of these foundational facets of aspirational Northeastern U.S. living as seen in Naughton’s work. I had only known uniforms to be imposed by institutions before. I knew that even if I bought those clothes I would not fit in, but many take on debt to blend in, driven by our grand society credo of fake it til you make it. (I should note that my friend, who is training to be a labor attorney, never owned pink shorts.)

Trading in the materiality for signification, Debt Ritual is a delicate but meaty work containing musings titled “Debt Ritual:…” from “ordinary objects” to “class” to, ultimately, if this is not a spoiler: “utopia.” In “Debt Ritual: Originary Objects,” Naughton writes:

at a regular supermarket. I’m thinking
about originary objects the already-
retro orange madras beach towel
I thought would always be what
a beach towel was the weave

Debt Ritual, in invoking Naughton’s moving resistance to her class status, frees up the functional limitations imposed by debt on leisure, creativity, experience, locating the reader in a questioning space, interrogating how capitalist forces and rank alienation have shaped our intimately lived lives. I found myself in a strange exercise of taxonomy: tallying the types of debts I encountered in Naughton’s work. I think I wanted to be free of the single notion of debt – owed to a shadowy institution in exchange for a little reprieve today. I found a wealth of categories: the debt of nostalgia, through her excursions through malls and memories; historical debt, through allusions to the history of banking, cities, structures; intellectual debt, to theorists and writers including Karl Marx, Lisa Robertson, Tyehimba Jess; and family debt of the writer to her many generations of ancestors in mill cities, especially to her grandmother:

my life-long poverty-line
grandmother’s advice was
if you have it use it
for what you were
interested in
and instantly feel
I need to defend her
nevertheless near-
complete and necessary
frugality the insistence
on virtue not accidental
the poem’s already there

There is a certain kind of virtue associated with frugality, a value that sustains itself through various ages of the Anthropocene. While Naughton struggles with her desire for things she associates with “what money can do” – buying oysters and lemons, for one—she also contends with anger at how these have been appropriated by money. It is not simply that work eats up our time—it’s that leisure is harder and harder to come by. In “Estranged Labor” in Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Karl Marx writes:

The less you eat, drink, buy books, go to the theatre or to balls, or to the pub, and the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you will be able to save and the greater will become your treasure which neither moth nor rust will corrupt—your capital. The less you are, the less you express your life, the more you have, the greater is your alienated life and the greater is the saving of your alienated being.

In describing the modern worker’s worship of capital as god, Marx’s writing references the Bible (Matthews  6:19-21), which cautions against valuing “treasures of earth where moth and rust doth corrupt” — instead we ought to direct our devotion to “treasures of heaven”—figurative futures we borrow against, credit scores, “good” debt.

Naughton mentions a line from a Catherine Wagner poem: 

“I made no money from my poems but they statused me”

Wagner also wrote: “Must write poems to fill the huge demand for them” in graduate school, when she felt ridiculous in spending time to write things that nobody cared about, especially not the market. It may have been tongue-in-cheek, but it also reads true––just like there are debts other than those the banking institutions would yoke us by, there are also types of demand that are beyond simple market forces.

Rituals push back against the fear of the unknown, the un controllable. Across the 18 poems found in the slim but potent 24-page book, Naughton’s debt ritual transforms the debt—at least the fear of the debt, the associated shame—and reinforces the value of the poem. 

Aditi Kini writes prose, scripts, and other text objects from an office with butterscotch walls in Ridgewood, Queens. Oriental Cyborg (2024) won Essay Press’s Chapbook Prize.