Today Hamlet

by Natalie Shapero

New pamphlet by Natalie Shapero. Natalie Shapero is author of poetry collections POPULAR LONGING, HARD CHILD, shortlisted for the International Griffin Poetry Prize, and NO OBJECT, winner of the Great Lakes College Association New Writers Award.

Paperback

About the author

Natalie 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.

Reviews

[Emily Taylor · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.3

This did not hold up to the legend of Natalie Shapero for me. No Object and Hard Child are really pithy, and witty and irreverent and this felt half-wrought in a lot of places. There were at least three references to red laundry washing in the whites, which made me wonder why the title wasn’t in reference to that, as opposed to ‘Today Hamlet’? Which then contributed to the overall “half-wrought” energy.

‘Who Died And Made You’, for example. The concept is really strong but the form feels like it was of convenience and the poet lost interest in editing about halfway through.

I’m also not from California. This is possibly why I just didn’t get it. Sorry to all the die hard Shapero fans out there I already know I’m going to catch mad shit for this review.