Stay Dead

by Natalie Shapero

In Stay 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.”

Genres: Poetry

82 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 9, 2025

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

[el · Rating 3 out of 5]

once again, i just don't get it.

the conversational, semi-ironic register works sometimes ("nightstand," "red item," "big mistake. big. huge.," "months at once," "careful" i highlighted as lovely outliers), but more often it does nothing for me, and the intertextual stitching becomes disruptive (and very masculine) rather than mosaic. also, nothing being expressed feels at all novel. very tumblr bebas neue, very millennial malaise, very jenny holzer but more unfiltered navel-gazing than i can normally stomach. 3.2/5.

[victoria marie · Rating 5 out of 5]

truly a beyond five star experience. recommend & recommend & recommend! my second favorite poetry book of 2025.

*

I DON'T HAVE ANY SEINE RIVER LIKE MONET ...
(Ed Ruscha)

*

and it always kind of sounds like you got murdered even or especially a studio on East 69th Street the artist Hedda Sterne born Hedwig Lindenberg in 1910 responded to the news of Rothko's death WHO WAS THIS MAN, MARK ROTHKO, WHO KILLED MY FRIEND?

(last lines of “Black on Dark Sienna on Purple,” page 14)

*

Capacity Crowd

I'm sick of waiting for this city to work
me out of itself like a splinter. I'm sick
of producing my own subsistence
as a way to literally express my being alive.
I'm sorry to have died and not really
noticed, but I've been so busy loving
what you're wearing and pouring
my paint right into the dip in the street
that drains to the sea. I never saw myself
represented in art until that movie
where the one guy is fed to the wood-
chipper: bye! I was so proud I cried.

(19)

*

I FIND MYSELF DISGUSTED BY MY PROFESSION . . .
(Claude Monet)

*

. . . EVERYTHING CHANGES, EVEN STONE
(Claude Monet)

[so much more photographed too, but will stop there! the Notes section is so long & lovely & amazing too!]

[Grace Anne · Rating 5 out of 5]

wowowow incredible

[Grace Biddle · Rating 5 out of 5]

We’re all actors and artists and we all wish we were dead

[Brianna · Rating 5 out of 5]

so good

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most competent and intelligent collections I’ve read in a while. That, or I’m just living through WW3.

[Ethan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Shapero has an inimitable voice. This is her strongest collection, and she continues to develop her lyricism. Nobody writes like Natalie Shapero, which is something you can say about very few contemporary poets.

[Anna Lockhart · Rating 5 out of 5]

best endnotes I’ve ever read, I tell ya what

[Jeff · Rating 3 out of 5]

Stay Dead by Natalie Shapero made the shortlist for the 2025 National Book Award for Poetry. It is a collection of typical contemporary poetry: lyrical, free verse, and autobiographical in nature.

The themes for this collection are death, dying, the afterlife, method acting, and abstract expressionism. There are cameos from Monet, Plath, and . . . Anthony Bourdain?

As I always say in these reviews, I tend to be a bit more conservative in my poetry preferences. I like all the strictures of traditional poetry. Occasionally, I find a piece of contemporary poetry that really speaks to me . . . but this ain’t it.

I do, however, try to find some poems that stick out to me in every collection, so here are two from Stay Dead:

Fireball
Please stop circulating the untrue rumor
that I have been telling people I hope there is
no Heaven, that one world
is enough. Bandages stocked
in the padlocked aisle, claim denial, bird
spikes, rent hikes, people sleeping in arrays
of rags and being categorized as rags—why
wouldn’t I want more of what God made?
You said NATURE IS INDIFFERENT
TO SUFFERING. I said whoa you and nature
have so much in common—you should get
together sometime. Listen, if it looks like
I’m dying, I’m not—I’m just burning
up in Earth’s atmosphere like comet debris
on impact, piercing the field
and then flashing away. It should be any day.

——

Nightstand
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’s 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—

I FIND MYSELF DISGUSTED BY MY PROFESSION . . .
(Claude Monet)

[JM · Rating 5 out of 5]

After two other books, I was starting to feel like I'd been given a bad recommendation - that I needed to file this author under 'not for me'. I'm so glad I picked this one up and kept reading. The humor is sharp, and it undercuts the darkness the way I think the other books were intending but not managing.

Normally I would pick out a favorite gem or two to quote, but there's so many of them here - Centimeter Ruler, Enough, And Certainly Not Least, all of these are great. Fox is a strong contender for my favorite, if I had to choose.

[Nancy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can't turn to a poem in this book and not want to get you over and read this right now. They are all plugged in to the electrical current that goes from our mortal howl to, oddly, to Mark Rothko. I did not know I needed to know so much about him and the other painters. But I did. All I want is for Natalie to write more and not die and write about anything including not dying at the same time as writing about not dying.

[josh x · Rating 5 out of 5]

“But what I love about my dog is not her desperation for me, but how she does not feel shame about her desperation, the way I feel about my desperation for you”

this collection won’t please everyone. i don’t think it’s meant to. if you’ve been kicked in or abused or mistreated or misused, this might just be the book for you…

“never say never” - brandy, before she killed someone

[Anne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Maybe you feel like the world is crumbling. Maybe it is. Maybe actually a friend is dying. Another friend just died. Death seems omnipresent. This book is for us, all of us in our hopelessness, all of us who nevertheless want humor, sarcasm, a clarity about the weirdness of the words and the world we’re given.

[Dyson Kona · Rating 5 out of 5]

nat my goat

word cloud for the book

space
world
long dashes

acting painting - labour to mimic real life

iterative and momentus
cross referencing and (world breaking not building)

long dashes (unresolvable)

[Erica Moore · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible. And I’m especially in awe of how funny these poems are. I guess I don’t really ever equate poetry with humor. Full review to come. I have a few reviews to catch up on this month.

2025 National Book Awards Poetry Longlist: 3/13

[Ella · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent collection of sardonic, gut-wrenching, sometimes hilarious poetry.

[Mark Filipovic · Rating 5 out of 5]

loft, splintered, ironic, plotting, river, overlong, red, manufacture, infinitessitude, sear

[Ben Rowe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hard Child is one of my very favourite recent poetry collections and Popular Longings is really almost as good. This is probably the book I am most looking forward to picking up and reading ( and re-reading and re-reading) this year.