David Schurman Wallace reviews Natalie Shapero\u2019s new collection \u201cStay Dead.\u201d<\/p>\n
Stay Dead by Natalie Shapero. Copper Canyon Press, 2025. 104 pages.<\/p>\n
IN 1959, THE PAINTER Mark Rothko told Life magazine that \u201ca painting is not a picture of an experience; it is an experience.\u201d But what is that experience, exactly? Rothko is our culture\u2019s synecdoche for a kind of communion with art\u2014call it spiritual immersion. You enter the gallery and face the blurred rectangles, light and dark, ochre and red or black and purple, and you try to believe you are looking not just at it, but also into it: into a more profound truth than words can express. Pure color, maybe, though one suspects there\u2019s more to it than \u201cthe pure.\u201d Perhaps the point is that you can\u2019t articulate the experience at all\u2014that you\u2019ve just been granted time, a moment to no longer feel trapped with yourself and your wearing daily cares. You can lose yourself for a few minutes in the work.<\/p>\n
Of course, Rothko\u2019s search for the experience came at a great cost. As the critic Calvin Tomkins put it in The New Yorker, Rothko was \u201ca lifelong, dedicated depressive who thought of himself as a \u2018supreme pessimist.\u2019\u201d Tomkins points out that \u201cthe years of his long-delayed recognition and subsequent fame were marked by failed marriages, broken friendships, poor health, heavy drinking, rage, guilt, and more or less predictable suicide\u2014in 1970, at the age of sixty-six.\u201d This is another way to lose yourself, and not simply as a tragic case: transcendence and abjection are difficult to disentangle. In Natalie Shapero\u2019s fourth book of poetry, Stay Dead (2025), she dwells on Rothko, along with a fistful of other methods for losing consciousness, often hoping to stay lost longer. Shapero\u2019s mordant humor and intellectual agility throw a challenge to the reader: In contemporary life, are we dead or alive? Could we be both, or in between? How could we tell? In a poem titled \u201cBig Mistake. Big. Huge.,\u201d Shapero comes both with sympathy and skepticism to Rothko\u2019s grand myth:<\/p>\n
Mark Rothko was just too trusting
when he announced I\u2019M INTERESTED ONLY
IN EXPRESSING BASIC HUMAN
EMOTIONS\u2014TRAGEDY, ECSTASY, DOOM,
AND SO ON. Personally, I couldn\u2019t begin
to fill in what the other ones are.<\/p>\n
The poem proceeds into a complex pattern of associations, from a bad joke to a quote from Jean-Luc Godard to Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman. Sublimation isn\u2019t so easy\u2014contemporary brains, phone-conditioned and easily jarred, lurch from one idea to another, seeking a resting place but unable to find it. \u201cBasic human emotion\u201d has become a fraught category, even as poets try to clear the ground. (Shapero is an expert at merging high and low references, though she as much as admits that this is itself another kind of playacting.) In other poems, Shapero circles the idea of Method acting, craving the ability to lose one\u2019s identity completely: \u201cif I\u2019m unequipped, \/\/ as I\u2019ve been in these times, to recognize just \/ who I am, isn\u2019t there a real risk I\u2019ll inadvertently step into someone \/ I do not realize is me? No further questions.\u201d A risk, yes, but also there\u2019s an appeal in shedding the burden of the poet\u2019s voice, the musical signature that keeps the ego doggedly in the spotlight, soliciting applause.<\/p>\n
This is a depressive\u2019s book. As Shapero\u2019s speaker puts it in \u201cCapacity Crowd,\u201d \u201cI\u2019m sick \/ of producing my own subsistence \/ as a way to literally express my being alive.\u201d Later in the poem, the speaker expresses affinity with the character in the 1996 film Fargo (Steve Buscemi as Carl Showalter) whose corpse is fed to the woodchipper to make it disappear: \u201cbye! I was so proud I cried.\u201d The idea of death keeps returning in various guises: as a garbage chute, as a target in the path of a truck, as a bug crushed by a droplet of rain, as a rogue comet burned to cinders by the earth\u2019s atmosphere.<\/p>\n
Shapero\u2019s last book, Popular Longing (2021), began with a self-directive to live, meager in pleasure as that might be: \u201cNow I eat right, \/ train hard, get my shots. This life\u2014I\u2019m angling \/ to remain in this life as long as I can, being almost \/ certain, as I am, what\u2019s after\u2014\u201d That work dealt more with questions of labor and of money, feeling for a political valence of lived experience, even as the poems contained plenty of gallows humor. Something seems to have happened in the interval, as the poems of Stay Dead are more inward-facing, grappling with what seems to be a traumatic event, hinted at but never quite made explicit\u2014\u201cthe man who killed me\u201d is the closest thing to a culprit. But in refusing an easy confessional disclosure, Shapero enlarges her poems. Take \u201cNightstand,\u201d reproduced here in full:<\/p>\n
I keep picking up the book about trauma and recovery, but right
when I get to the end of section one, the door rings, the dog pukes,
the heater blows, fraud alert, tornado drill, get out
here fast, you gotta see this truck that ignored the height sign
on the underpass and now it\u2019s lodged like an overlarge pill
in the throat of the off-ramp, tangling the city where I poison
myself with the past, cough it up, cough it up\u2014<\/p>\n
Pain and death are the ground from which writing begins, but they become a negative window for observing a chaotic world, uncontrollable but inevitable, perhaps even arresting in all its teeming noise. In another grouping of poems, Shapero\u2019s speaker objects to being called a \u201csurvivor,\u201d using the term to open out centrifugally into a wide variety of images and thoughts. The solution to being a survivor, the poem suggests, is simply to die: \u201cThat\u2019s called WOMEN\u2019S INGENUITY.\u201d But this moment of deadpan works a spring: what might be missed after death (the feeling of tearing Parker House rolls), Malcolm X and Ho Chi Minh\u2019s time in the kitchen at the Parker House Hotel, shared birthdays, changed names (we come back to Rothko, via his eccentric assimilation from Rothkowitz), the dubious meaning of knowing facts, and what it means to know death. A thin filament of logic keeps the poem surging forward, even if it\u2019s ultimately a circuit back to mortality.<\/p>\n
Key phrases return again and again, shared between poems: death and begrudging resurrection, Hamlet, the questionable idea of Paris as an artist\u2019s escape. Shapero has always overlapped ideas and quotes in her books, but in Stay Dead, this seems more like a repetition compulsion, a problem that can\u2019t get worked through. The past is fixed, and we can\u2019t stop poisoning ourselves with it; we\u2019d like to cough up the pill, but asking yourself to do it and really doing it are two different things.<\/p>\n
In all of her books, Shapero\u2019s strength comes through her thinking on the page. Without being rote, she is careful to develop the thread of an idea from each sentence to the next. Reading her work, it becomes clear how comfortable some contemporary poets have become with \u201cleaps\u201d that are more like abysses, relying on the reader to assume that there is a hidden connection that may not really exist. In Stay Dead, the connections tend to stay tight, working the starting idea of the poem for more material, and are less likely to digress into unusual pockets of fact or language that made some of her earlier work lighter, if still rich. Humor remains, but the speech is starker\u2014life or death, or death and then life again.<\/p>\n
Varied and surprising as they are, there is something bracing about the negativity of the poems in Stay Dead. They are uncompromising in their refusal of easy answers, the little lift that comes from appealing to love (or some other \u201cbasic human emotion\u201d) at the end of the poem. An intriguing suggestion comes in one of the epigraphs between sections, courtesy of Monet: \u201cI FIND MYSELF DISGUSTED BY MY PROFESSION.\u201d Fatigued by experience, fatigued by the speaking voice, the desire to lose oneself can also register as a dissent against poetry\u2019s platitudes, which might make a career if you\u2019re lucky, but which don\u2019t seem to live up to the world\u2019s despair.<\/p>\n
This isn\u2019t exactly The Hatred of Poetry or the repeated-until-it-reassures mantra of \u201cI, too, dislike it.\u201d Instead, there is a more visceral ambivalence, a mood that comes not from an intellectual project but from the experience of dispossession. Readers of contemporary poetry are used to the poet\u2019s appeal to the sublime, or else a certain kind of hazy liberal fatalism\u2014we\u2019re writing poetry \u201cat the end of the world\u201d and so on. Shapero faces destruction with stoicism, as in \u201cRemember My Decision for One Day,\u201d which, thinking about trees, flips the nature poem:<\/p>\n
[S]hould the spruce
be extinguished or permitted
to burn, is destruction necessary, is extinction
built into nature, aren\u2019t we all inherently
brutal, isn\u2019t the quest for constancy futile, isn\u2019t it
beautiful to be fired, isn\u2019t there peace
in every pause, doesn\u2019t getting gutted
set you free, isn\u2019t that actually good for the tree?<\/p>\n
Lacing a semi-ironic rhyme into the final line, Shapero treats the question seriously to the point of nihilism, which is to ask why anything deserves to live or die. Another question lies beneath: What can the poem, specifically, do here? Why not take up acting or painting instead? Refusing to let any commonplace off the hook, Shapero stress-tests the idea of poetry as necessary\u2014that \u201cthe best words in the best order,\u201d as Coleridge put it, might save us.<\/p>\n
Found speech, styled in all caps, has been a hallmark of Shapero\u2019s poems since her first book, No Object (2013). These interjections have an important place in her poems, peppering them with the defamiliarized, reminding us that we\u2019re always brushing up against clich\u00e9 or profundity (the caps spike them a little harder into the work than quotes might), that language never flows from one source. We take in information from the world that surpasses our own powers of expression or of understanding, and voice is never just our own voice. Maybe there is some solace in this contingency. This is a form of speaking to and for the dead\u2014perhaps poetry\u2019s oldest role, and one that can\u2019t quite be extinguished, even if the poet might prefer that sometimes. There is, however tenuous, still some company out there.<\/p>\n
In the book\u2019s opening poem, \u201cSpacewalk,\u201d Shapero expands on the problem of the past:<\/p>\n
I used to talk stuff out
with the dead, but now I can\u2019t even
do that anymore. They stopped understanding
my references. They failed
to intuit tone. We are witnessing an age
of unprecedented divide
between this life and after; they only
want to be with their own.<\/p>\n
Increasingly unmoored from history, from memory, and from a shared language, we must fend for ourselves. No wonder the appeal of removing ourselves from the picture. (Still, the poems get written.) Elaborating this thought, the poem works toward another pill, the one that astronauts are supposedly given to commit suicide if the spacewalk goes wrong and they\u2019re left drifting through endless space. Surely that would be a novel kind of out-of-body experience. Shapero hopes they get to keep the poison even if they come back.<\/p>\n
LARB Contributor<\/p>\n
David Schurman Wallace is a writer living in New York City.<\/p>\n
Share<\/p>\n
Copy link to articleLARB Staff Recommendations<\/p>\n
Amanda Hawkins explores Michael M. Weinstein\u2019s new poetry collection \u201cSaint Consequence.\u201d<\/p>\n
Amanda Hawkins<\/a>Aug 17<\/p>\n Tianyi considers Yuki Tanaka\u2019s debut collection \u201cChronicle of Drifting.\u201d<\/p>\n