Rae Armantrout's "Soft Money," from Money Shot, transplants the language of sexual desire into the context of the current economic meltdown. The poem reads as a glibly sexualized description of an unnamed "they," and opens with the following lines:

They're sexy

because they're needy,which degrades them.

What this poem highlights, for me, is the way narcissistic consumerism

—Tracy K. Smith