Stay Dead
by Natalie Shapero
Copper Canyon Press, 2025
Review by Noah Warren
IN IT
If you’ve seen a Natalie Shapero poem around in the past few years, you might have suspected that the SMALL CAPS ARE MULTIPLYING. They have, for the past few books, peppered the Shapero playbook: namely, poems of antic wit that knock on the fourth wall; wry records of the absurdities of living and working under capitalism; meditations that snake around and through the questions of sexual-trauma suicide; and (everyone’s favorite) inspired smackdowns on Boston. I can confirm that with Stay Dead, Shapero’s fourth collection, uppercase abounds, including some caps-happy epigraphs. Shapero often riffs, not without medium-envy, on painting and painters, but whereas in Popular Longing (2021) a Magritte epigraph is rendered in italics, this volume’s cast speaks in mini-majuscule. “I FIND MYSELF DISGUSTED BY MY PROFESSION” Monet admits, then, “THESE PALM TREES ARE DRIVING ME CRAZY.” (23, 55) It’s a Monet that sounds suspiciously like the Los Angeles-based Shapero, whose attempts to break into acting, and abandon the profession of poetry, are one of the delights of this collection.
The pint-sized capitalization ultimately has an outsized impact. Instead of cordoning off reported speech, as quotation marks do, or making it pretty and speedy, as italics do, we get a muffled shout. In “Play In,” Shapero links this stylistic choice to the acting-quest: since people find her, interpersonally, “borderline / imperceptible” from a regular distance, they recommend she try movies, which have the benefit of “enlargement, the ability to be transmitted to others by close-up.” (11) What a loneliness. I sometimes found myself reading all the knee-high type as a Rodney Dangerfield bit, a torque of melancholy, with intermittent success. Fundamentally, small caps estrange: we’re not used to reading them, especially not in poetry, and so the language we find there is tonally unstable in such a way as to keep us guessing re irony, re whether we’re supposed to be reading quietly or staging a theater in our brains. (Insert JS Mill, nodding in approbation.) In “True Apothecary,” a younger speaker hears people nitpicking “the Alanis Morisette song ironic” and is “shy / […] to term things IRONIC in case I was getting it wrong.” (26) Shapero juxtaposes two different usages of IRONIC: as a proper name, or the song’s title, and the common modifier. The small caps seem to dramatize how the public or connotative idiom anxiously overwrites and comes to structure the private or the denotative. We hear the speaker overhearing herself, for our benefit, what she might say, but won’t. This is self-censorship, and the governing affect here, as often in Stay Dead, is shame.
Insecurity comes back in “Long Week Talking,” with the stakes heightened. “I am ashamed to keep thinking of death,” the speaker begins, with grim candor, before overwriting that frankness with a simile: “as a chute that connects to the garbage.” Like Bart Simpson at the chalkboard, she corrects herself: “I know I should / picture it more like the pneumatic tubes / at the banks of the past[. …] I know a bank // should be the operative metaphor / for every facet of existence, every time.” (15) One name for the gap between what we feel and what we feel that we should feel is ideology. In a few lines, Shapero shows us how various the inadmissible discourses are in this America: the body’s messiness (“garbage”); death as a raw, real fact, and a potential choice, and not just an anodyne abstraction; any negative affect whatsoever; and, loudest, a relationship to the self, to others, and to language, unmolested by the dead hand of the market. It’s a crux of prohibitions, with the ensuing paralysis of the individual, which locks down even the freedom to think, the book’s grim, recurrent problem.
Shapero does not get out of it; there is no getting out of it. Instead, like James Bond suspended over a shark pool, precarity brings out charisma and resourcefulness. Shapero’s speakers fillip a series of improbable solutions, all of which are related to the thespian turn. The first is camp and its associated weapons: exaggeration, repetition or talking back, extrapolation ad absurdum. When in the archly Whitmanian “I Tune My Body and My Brain to the Music of the Land” the problems of modernity return, including the ways in which it limits self-conception, Shapero scores a momentary pass by way of serious hilarity:
Asked why he didn’t paint
from nature, Jackson Pollock responded I AM NATURE.
Asked why I don’t live in an admittedly flawed
utopian experiment in which work is substituted
for property as the basis of social belonging,
I SAY I AM AN ADMITTEDLY FLAWED UTOPIAN
EXPERIMENT IN WHICH WORK IS SUBSTITUTED
FOR PROPERTY AS THE BASIS OF SOCIAL
BELONGING (49)
Repetition is the syntax of charms and magic, as repetition with variation structures the joke form. Both are arts of the unconscious, and as such scramble the withered rationality that capitalism glories and depends upon. Riff, flip the script. Plunge your captor into the sharks.
Or, GO DEEPER, and dive into the tank yourself. “Who doesn’t want to be / in something?” a speaker longs, before jump-cutting to Rothko, who intones “HOWEVER YOU PAINT THE LARGER PICTURE / YOU ARE IN IT” (12). In the subsequent poem, the phrase modulates to the LA sense: “So badly I’ve wanted to be IN SOMETHING and now it turns out / I am. What I’m in is the wrong line, the absolute wrong line / of work. Should have been an actor!” (13) Indeed, variants of the in/out binary recur so frequently throughout Stay Dead that this gesture might be the central philosophical statement of the book. Alongside it, we see recurrent dramas of perspective—sometimes painterly or filmic, but also the speaker’s attempt to perceive the earth from outer space (3), or as God (66), or after death (passim). As a philosophical statement, it’s a somewhat beautiful, somewhat melancholy answer to the Hamlet question that thuds throughout as a bass line. The promise of being IN SOMETHING might be, when, for instance, one’s deciding whether to 86 oneself, a way of getting out of the tyranny of having to perform being an individual without taking the irrevocable step. For Shapero, IN SOMETHING has a range of valences: the phenomenological absorption of making or viewing art, as Rothko suggests; some degree of participation in the American dream machine; subsumption by pobiz (a career of “wrong lines”); or, beyond these, the horizon of collectivism and the embedded Adornian critique that might call it forward. Not that anyone’s waiting for communism. Always in Stay Dead, the main reason to be IN SOMETHING is to have a reason not to kill yourself.
Which returns us to the question of ACTING, in many ways the discovery and engine for Shapero. One of the fun things about this is how, in a book this self-aware, over-the-top performance becomes a framework for thinking about how poems can connect us with others by making identity a variable that is produced in the spark of connection between the speaker and the reader. It makes the production of language and selves a shared activity. ACTING, then, becomes a way of defeating alienation by interpreting and entering others’ lives. Doing so, it unmasks the kinds of soul-crushing performances capitalism already demands of us by magnifying it. In one of the most polyphonic poems, “86,” the speaker meditates on whether to end it all by bouncing back and forth between the attestations of two who chose not to be, Anthony Bourdain and Sylvia Plath. For that speaker, the lines that come to mind are I ROCKED SHUT // AS A SEASHELL (Sylvia Plath) and IT SLAMMED ME / SHUT LIKE A BOOK (Anthony Bourdain).” (45) Soon these channeled voices take over the poem, and the question of death, a little playfully, blurs with the question of lower GI distress. The point here is the small caps, which don’t signify simple quotation so much as a willful inhabitation of others’ words, in which we have to hear both the reproduced language and something extra, the speaker making that language timely, bodying and vamping it. When “86” ends by mashing up the food poisoning episode of The Bell Jar with a psychologist’s intake form and “I EAT MEN LIKE AIR,” we recognize that this is a kind of a solution: by living in others’ language, by leaning into the reality of their experiences, the speaker has achieved a kind of exit. Insensibly, time has swum through, and the moment of crisis has passed.
Finally, beyond or after all the play of attitudes and comedic bits lies a hard-earned sincerity, specifically love poems. In a collection so concerned with the trap of selfhood—understood as simultaneously the enforced alienation of modernity and the chief currency of lyric poetry—these earnest turns toward the other are experienced as a salve, a reset. Among the most gorgeous, “My Teacher Again” features no small caps. Instead, with piercing vulnerability, the speaker reflects on the shame of desperately needing someone, a shame transcended after a dark night of the soul when, after the speaker has been “up all night,” the other, Ricky, appears in the kitchen, sleepily, angelically, at six in the morning. I found the poem so moving in part because, under the pressure of simple human need, it negates the core moves of the rest of the book and, in doing so, shows their value.
Shapero’s voice achieves a new range and depth in Stay Dead. Like all the richest laughs, it vibrates with the sensuousness of death.