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InStay Dead, Shapero examines performance, power, comedy, and despair through the lenses of method acting and abstract expressionism.
The politics of labor and performance collide with comedy and tragedy in Natalie Shapero's fourth poetry collection,Stay Dead. Shapero's unflinching poems explore theories of acting, discourses of survival, privacy and publicity, power and punchlines, and the language of despair. This work explores how “your death place / is the birthplace you choose. 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. With a cutting, sardonic voice, 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.
US
Natalie Shaperois the author of the poetry collectionsPopular Longing(Copper Canyon, 2021),Hard Child(Copper Canyon, 2021), andNo Object(Saturnalia, 2013), as well as the pamphletToday Hamlet(Out-Spoken, 2023). Her writing has appeared inThe London Review of Books, Granta, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The Nation,The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review,and elsewhere. Her awards include a Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Great Lakes College Associalc™
![Stay Dead [Paperback]](/itemImage/2/4/1/1/2_6941013.jpg "Stay Dead [Paperback]")