Debt Ritual

Author: Katie Naughton

Publisher: BUNNY (2025)

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. Debt Ritual sets up an equivalence between money and participation in the world and then works to destabilize it. Furthermore, in an American context in which a vast majority of the country considers themselves “middle class,” Naughton’s book interrogates the wide disparity in middle class experiences and what it means to write from within a system in which you hold some power but have in other ways been excluded from it. How do you write critically about something you are also complicit in?

The size and shape of a U.S. dollar bill, Debt Ritual considers the ritualistic use inherent in money and debt and wonders how and if the ritual of art-making replicates — or interrupts — the rituals of finance.