Winner of the 2023 BUNNY chapbook contest, Katie Naughton’s Debt Ritual sees debt as intensely private yet nevertheless significantly interconnected with global financial systems and other systems of power. Naughton’s text is interested in the way that what appears as money is often funded by debt, while also taking into account the role of art, something that offers social capital without the accompanying wealth.

"Living as we do in a world shot through by financialized capital, a poet wonders: is this debt a thing, mine, a private burden, stones in so many pockets, or is it a ritual so common it devolves into the habitual? Is it a credit card balance we look at only in a darkened room, or is it some stuff of the public, a substrate of the present, material for social being? In these poems, Katie Naughton lays opaque, because so layered, our multifaceted encounters with debt—that delayed, accumulated, promised, threatened, desired, feared form of value that is somehow both not-yet and present, burying you. She touches on the ways debt continually touches us, an inescapable thing that’s not really a thing but also, inexplicably, hauntingly, is."
—Travis Sharp