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No Object
"It is unbefitting to believe in ghosts, to believe what one reads, /what one writes," writes Natalie Shapero in her mischievous debut collection. With sharp wit and relentless questioning, Shapero crafts poems a reader can, if not believe in, then trust--to level with us, to surprise us, and to stay with us long after we put the book down. No Object is a fast ride you will not easily forget.
- GenresPoetry
80 pages, Paperback
First published March 12, 2013
3 people are currently reading
167 people want to read
About the author
Natalie Shapero
13 books41 followersNatalie Shapero is a professor of the practice of poetry at Tufts University. Her most recent poetry collection is Hard Child (Copper Canyon, 2017), which was shortlisted for the Griffin International Poetry Prize. Her previous collection, No Object (Saturnalia, 2013), received the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award. Natalie’s writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Poetry, and elsewhere, and she is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, and a Kenyon Review Fellowship.
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
May 20, 2013
"At the end of my suffering/ there was a door," Louise Gluck says in "Wild Iris": Natalie Shapero's wry, twisted, and heart-breaking No Object marks, then stomps over that suffering, and is that door.
Throughout the collection, the author wrestles with history, love, and illness, with the grandeur of Hopkins and the savoir-faire and urgency of Artaud: but, note bene, this author is a woman, whose "difference" from the male figures she historicizes, channels, and satirizes (GIVE A MAN AN INCH, HE THINKS HE'S A RULER), as a woman poet who both makes light of the sexual/romantic contract and the differend b/w the sexes while acknowledging the need for a love based on appreciation of heterogeneity -- the space between "not man" and woman as other ("His common/ letters I have sat up reading, mouthing out/ the worst of them as though/ in peaceable worship of a genius teen oh DON'T/ YOU MAYBE LIKE ME A LITTLE BIT? YOU MUST/ ADMIT I AM DIFFERENT.")
The pathos of these encounters, while dethroning Dorothy Parker and Anne Sexton in one fell swoop, however, cuts deep:
"I never said, like, baby, I don't need you/ to make me hate myself--I get enough/ of that at home.// I live alone."
Throughout No Object, Jean-Jacques Rousseau's writings on the dwarf/giant (also John Crowley's Little, Big) haunt, reminding us that the Adamic function reduces the chaos of undifferentiated matter, through naming/measurement, and judgment/valuation, into appreciable form. In a Rousseau quote that speaks to the guiding spirit of Shapero's debut, the assembly-line machinist-inventor Henry Ford: "I see nothing in any animal but an ingenious machine, to which nature hath given senses to wind itself up, and to guard itself, to a certain degree, against anything that might tend to disorder or destroy it. I perceive exactly the same things in the human machine, with this difference, that in the operations of the brute, nature is the sole agent, whereas man has some share in his own operations, in his character as a free agent." Here, then, is Shapero: "I DON'T PAY ANY ATTENTION TO WHAT YOU WRITE/ ABOUT ME, ONLY MEASURE IT IN INCHES.")
Measurement-as-rubric: the formalization of the market's fixed price/contingent value assignation and subsequent death of qualitative and critical judgement?
Wrenching herself from the ur-text assigned to brilliant women for centuries (hysteria and 20th century psychiatric malaise), the speaker's pent-up jouissance is everywhere tempered by her invocation of friendship, philos, and worser times (i.e. the Hun invasion): "there are a few good parts/ for women, count your blessings . . . .yes where/ were the stars while our elders were raping each other, they failed as watchmen and now they're gone, thanks a lot, Swan, thanks a lot,/ Southern Cross, I don't know why it happens . . . "
No failing to admire, and love, unless senseless, Shapero's claims to self, liminal, foreboding humor, resistance to the order of the same, and the mesmeric animation, of the produced subject becoming real:
"I felt then my own sickness:/ sudden and unique. How I was held in real restraints/ as the sweet plums danced on plates and the tin toys came to life."
Throughout the collection, the author wrestles with history, love, and illness, with the grandeur of Hopkins and the savoir-faire and urgency of Artaud: but, note bene, this author is a woman, whose "difference" from the male figures she historicizes, channels, and satirizes (GIVE A MAN AN INCH, HE THINKS HE'S A RULER), as a woman poet who both makes light of the sexual/romantic contract and the differend b/w the sexes while acknowledging the need for a love based on appreciation of heterogeneity -- the space between "not man" and woman as other ("His common/ letters I have sat up reading, mouthing out/ the worst of them as though/ in peaceable worship of a genius teen oh DON'T/ YOU MAYBE LIKE ME A LITTLE BIT? YOU MUST/ ADMIT I AM DIFFERENT.")
The pathos of these encounters, while dethroning Dorothy Parker and Anne Sexton in one fell swoop, however, cuts deep:
"I never said, like, baby, I don't need you/ to make me hate myself--I get enough/ of that at home.// I live alone."
Throughout No Object, Jean-Jacques Rousseau's writings on the dwarf/giant (also John Crowley's Little, Big) haunt, reminding us that the Adamic function reduces the chaos of undifferentiated matter, through naming/measurement, and judgment/valuation, into appreciable form. In a Rousseau quote that speaks to the guiding spirit of Shapero's debut, the assembly-line machinist-inventor Henry Ford: "I see nothing in any animal but an ingenious machine, to which nature hath given senses to wind itself up, and to guard itself, to a certain degree, against anything that might tend to disorder or destroy it. I perceive exactly the same things in the human machine, with this difference, that in the operations of the brute, nature is the sole agent, whereas man has some share in his own operations, in his character as a free agent." Here, then, is Shapero: "I DON'T PAY ANY ATTENTION TO WHAT YOU WRITE/ ABOUT ME, ONLY MEASURE IT IN INCHES.")
Measurement-as-rubric: the formalization of the market's fixed price/contingent value assignation and subsequent death of qualitative and critical judgement?
Wrenching herself from the ur-text assigned to brilliant women for centuries (hysteria and 20th century psychiatric malaise), the speaker's pent-up jouissance is everywhere tempered by her invocation of friendship, philos, and worser times (i.e. the Hun invasion): "there are a few good parts/ for women, count your blessings . . . .yes where/ were the stars while our elders were raping each other, they failed as watchmen and now they're gone, thanks a lot, Swan, thanks a lot,/ Southern Cross, I don't know why it happens . . . "
No failing to admire, and love, unless senseless, Shapero's claims to self, liminal, foreboding humor, resistance to the order of the same, and the mesmeric animation, of the produced subject becoming real:
"I felt then my own sickness:/ sudden and unique. How I was held in real restraints/ as the sweet plums danced on plates and the tin toys came to life."
May 13, 2023
With blurbs by Denise Duhamel and Kathy Fagan, Natalies Shapero's poetry book No Object lives up to their praise. Denise wrote, "...a book of delightful and glistening riddles." Kathy Fagan wrote, "...Shapero casts a cold eye on life, on death...."
No Please After You
Couldn't keep anything down. Slept in my dress.
Craned to the difficult like a fern to the sun.
Visited home and woke to my family yelling
about a neighbor who went to a funeral
and had to call it vacation for HR.
What is the world, they said. I said I agree.
My family taught me to be extremely polite,
to always pause for questions. Made my stories
interminable. The funeral was a friend,
shot in a crab shack by the man whose wife
he was screwing. Can't please everyone,
I always say, then try to. A long ago
boyfriend told me I could find success
in porn, not that I have a dynamo body
or anything, but because I am like a child,
and a high percentage of men are attracted to kids,
more than you would think. We were together
for a long time. I've never looked much older.
In the poem "You're Allowed" she uses an Andy Warhol quote (which I looked up and found on a Paulo Coelho blog quoting Andy as “Don’t pay any attention to what they write about you. Just measure it in inches."): she uses, "I don't pay attention to what you write about me, only measure it in inches."
"Orange On the Nail" opens:
Whatever is said to mate for life, doesn't. Science was awful
at telling birds apart, took any speckled hen in the next
for the same one every time. Now we know more."
I found lots of real to love in this book. Thanks to Saturnalia Books.
No Please After You
Couldn't keep anything down. Slept in my dress.
Craned to the difficult like a fern to the sun.
Visited home and woke to my family yelling
about a neighbor who went to a funeral
and had to call it vacation for HR.
What is the world, they said. I said I agree.
My family taught me to be extremely polite,
to always pause for questions. Made my stories
interminable. The funeral was a friend,
shot in a crab shack by the man whose wife
he was screwing. Can't please everyone,
I always say, then try to. A long ago
boyfriend told me I could find success
in porn, not that I have a dynamo body
or anything, but because I am like a child,
and a high percentage of men are attracted to kids,
more than you would think. We were together
for a long time. I've never looked much older.
In the poem "You're Allowed" she uses an Andy Warhol quote (which I looked up and found on a Paulo Coelho blog quoting Andy as “Don’t pay any attention to what they write about you. Just measure it in inches."): she uses, "I don't pay attention to what you write about me, only measure it in inches."
"Orange On the Nail" opens:
Whatever is said to mate for life, doesn't. Science was awful
at telling birds apart, took any speckled hen in the next
for the same one every time. Now we know more."
I found lots of real to love in this book. Thanks to Saturnalia Books.
December 31, 2025
I wasn't a big fan of this collection, but there were a few good ones here:
"You won't dispose of sapped batteries, for fear they'll leak. You retire them to a drawer, where they are near the unused ones, and can't be told apart, and so you are forever trying to spark what doesn't give a spark. Snapping them into the kitchen clock, reading the same wrong time of day, do you think of me and ever, for a little, let them stay?"
"Without is how I go. The best defenses fluctuate in scope and in supply. The price of attack dogs now is very high. I've hidden my old love's letters in a bag. Reading one is eating from the trash. In the dream I heard his actual laugh. Outcasts only care what outcasts think. I gather together the people I have hurt and rate them. Lover's hair, like a red shirt shirt washed with a white shirt. Nobody can forgive. I hate them, and they hate me back. In the dream I heard his actual laugh. It's often said, of eating from the trash, that many women do it. You have slammed the lid, but then again, it's diet be damned and what a waste. Fries in a paper sack, dirty from coffee grounds. I almost gagged. In the dream I heard his actual laugh."
"You won't dispose of sapped batteries, for fear they'll leak. You retire them to a drawer, where they are near the unused ones, and can't be told apart, and so you are forever trying to spark what doesn't give a spark. Snapping them into the kitchen clock, reading the same wrong time of day, do you think of me and ever, for a little, let them stay?"
"Without is how I go. The best defenses fluctuate in scope and in supply. The price of attack dogs now is very high. I've hidden my old love's letters in a bag. Reading one is eating from the trash. In the dream I heard his actual laugh. Outcasts only care what outcasts think. I gather together the people I have hurt and rate them. Lover's hair, like a red shirt shirt washed with a white shirt. Nobody can forgive. I hate them, and they hate me back. In the dream I heard his actual laugh. It's often said, of eating from the trash, that many women do it. You have slammed the lid, but then again, it's diet be damned and what a waste. Fries in a paper sack, dirty from coffee grounds. I almost gagged. In the dream I heard his actual laugh."
August 6, 2024
Goddamn, this is good. It really satisfies all my poetry appetite and more: lyricism, sharp humour, questioning language and it's way of being both hilarious under the inquisitive eye, while also brutal. This is one of only a handful of poetry books I felt like I couldn't put down, and I think the humour is a big part of that engine. Gorg!!
June 14, 2018
Tore through this one pretty quick, but I’ve marked a LOT of pages to return to. Very readable, but also intense in a way that makes you sit back and stare at the pages a few minutes before moving on to the next poem.
September 29, 2019
These poems are like riddles--I had to read them all twice, but every reading was worth it. Natalie is a talented, talented poet. She writes like a seer, cutting straight through our garbage to what will be our downfall.
June 28, 2019
Jewelry on the page.
September 29, 2015
Shapero's poems may be sparse in the amount of space they take up on the page, but they are lush with feeling and imagery. Her language is highly abstract giving the collection a dreamlike feel, and many of her poems have a raw and deeply personal, even sensual, quality to them. The longest poem in the collection, Hot (Normal), was probably my favorite as it dug a little deeper than many of the others. Overall the experience of reading this book reminded me of going for a walk at night, glancing through the open window blinds of a stranger, and catching glimpses of someone's life when they don't know you're watching. Don't let my 3 star rating dissuade you - while the language of this collection didn't speak to me as deeply as some have, it is well worth picking up.
April 12, 2014
(4.5 Stars) In the poem, Lean Time, Shapero writes: "Outcasts only care what outcasts think." When I read that line I knew I was falling for Shapero's twisted enlightenment. No Object is smart, witty, challenging, and accessible. Today, I was reading the book in a coffee shop and caught myself saying out loud to myself, "Oh my god, this is brilliant!" These poems are slightly odd, slightly menacing, and full of questions. My favorites include: "Stars," "Bad Key," "Lean Time," "News to Me," "Little Winter," "Our War," "Arranged Hours," "No Please After You," "Hot (Normal)," and "Close Space."
March 17, 2017
This book is way smarter than I am. It would take me 10 more times through it to understand all it's telling me, and then I'd have to read it yet again. Irreverent, surprising, startlingly funny lines, often connecting the ordinary with the brilliant, this book embodies the real definition of metaphor: the previously unapprehended relationship of things, but add on "in delightfully unexpected ways." Moments of anger followed by moments of humor, raises a laughing but heartfelt middle finger at the ridiculous unjustness of life and then says, doesn't it just about kill you?
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December 4, 2013"A brilliant and moving collection of poetry, written by a graduate of the law school (class of 2011). Shapero is a 2012-2014 Kenyon Review fellow at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio and the recent recipient of a 2013 Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and Poetry magazine." - Richard McAdams
October 27, 2014
Copy of a copy, see the rut?
Nothing’s born that way.
How do you think I got to be where I am today?
It shows on my face. I’m all turned down,
Ill-suited to the lock of it,
the whole unluck of me.
With doors, if you can’t see the hinges, it’s a push.
Heavy ones you do
with both hands. Which is the way
God doesn’t give.
Nothing’s born that way.
How do you think I got to be where I am today?
It shows on my face. I’m all turned down,
Ill-suited to the lock of it,
the whole unluck of me.
With doors, if you can’t see the hinges, it’s a push.
Heavy ones you do
with both hands. Which is the way
God doesn’t give.
Read
March 5, 2014Natalie Shapero, JD’11
Author
From our pages (Mar–Apr/14)—
"Call of the wild: Going to the Law School helped Natalie Shapero, JD’11, let her poetry loose."
http://mag.uchicago.edu/arts-humaniti...
Author
From our pages (Mar–Apr/14)—
"Call of the wild: Going to the Law School helped Natalie Shapero, JD’11, let her poetry loose."
http://mag.uchicago.edu/arts-humaniti...
March 28, 2014
In NO OBJECT, Natalie Shapero writes razor-sharp poems that are three parts pain and one part humor. Her subject matter is limitless: sex, Woody Allen, history and the ragged dance of relationships gone awry.
May 14, 2014
Rollicking.
August 3, 2015
I am very impressed by Natalie's poetry. It's intelligent and engaging!
Read
October 20, 2017"The god I answer to is different/from the god I started with—still, I wouldn't say I get/around."
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews