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Natalie Shapero is the author of the poetry collections Popular Longing, Hard Child, and No Object. Her writing has appeared in the London Review of Books, Granta, the New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The Nation, and elsewhere. More about this author >
The politics of labor and performance collide with comedy and tragedy in Natalie Shapero’s Stay Dead. Shapero’s unflinching poems explore theories of acting, discourses of survival, privacy and publicity, power and punchlines, and the language of despair. With appearances by Claude Monet, Mark Rothko, Chris Burden, Studs Terkel, Anthony Bourdain, Gene Kelly, and others, Shapero investigates themes of method acting, abstract expressionism, and the production and commodification of intense expression and raw interiority. She offers sly examinations of labor and housing markets. She interrogates the influence of artists’ material conditions on the work they produce and the culture they shape. Shapero asks what it means to be a working artist under capitalism; which individuals are permitted earnest extensions of the self; and “whether being born is worth it.”
