Stevens wrote that poems are the cries of their occasions. In Money Is The Muse of Contrition, the cries taken on varied shapes and sounds. Some echo the sonnets of Bernadette Mayer and Ted Berrigan. Some work through Stein’s domestic epic, Tender Buttons, and some end up as lyric meditations on the brutal vagaries of the market (“Season of mists and mellow derivatives/Time of the lighter than air.”) and the intimacies of love. And though the occasions of the poems can be different, engaging politics, philosophy and the snap, crackle, pop of the everyday, they are shadowed by the financial meltdown of 2008: “We can afford/The house but not the school/The car but not the repairs and/We need the deck we’re paying/For. Well look at/That it’s history.”

"This collection is a succession of unabashed and guilty pleasures. The sprezzatura of Kaufmann’s language, how he casually torques the personal and everyday into the realm of the metaphysical, socio-political, and ethical, and then chills us with moments of breath-stopping lyricism, surprise, or perfectly calibrated wit, leaves a reader asking 'how did he do that?'"
—Mark Scroggins