[Poet Doug Van Gundy and photographer Matt Eich’s] piece, which was published in the Guardian in May 2019 with an introduction by writer Elizabeth Catte, is the first in a series of similar portfolios commissioned by Alissa Quart, the executive director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project (EHRP). Founded by writer and activist Barbara Ehrenreich, EHRP is a journalism organization that commissions projects covering poverty and economic inequality in creative and unconventional ways. EHRP then copublishes the pieces in media outlets such as the New York Times, the Guardian, and Vice.

The poetry of the EHRP portfolios reflects contemporary poets’ burgeoning engagement with the genre of documentary poetics. Quart describes the genre as a kind of socially engaged poetry that often uses nonliterary texts—news reports, legal documents, and transcribed oral histories, for example—and sometimes incorporates original reporting.

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