Popular Longing

by Natalie Shapero

Overview

The poems of Natalie Shapero’s third collection, Popular Longing, highlight the ever-increasing absurdity of our contemporary life. With her sharp, sardonic wit, Shapero deftly captures human meekness in all its forms: our senseless wars, our inflated egos, our constant deference to presumed higher powers—be they romantic partners, employers, institutions, or gods. “Why even / look up, when all we’ll see is people / looking down?” In a world where everyone has to answer to someone, it seems no one is equipped to disrupt the status quo, and how the most urgent topics of conversation can only be approached through refraction. By scrutinizing the mundane and all that is taken for granted, these poems arrive at much wider vistas, commenting on human sadness, memory, and mortality. Punchy, fearlessly ironic, and wickedly funny, Popular Longing articulates what it means to share a planet, for better or more often for worse, with other people.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781556595882
Publisher:	Copper Canyon Press
Publication date:	02/16/2021
Pages:	82
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Natalie Shapero is the current Professor of the Practice of Poetry at Tufts Universityin Massachusetts. Her most recent poetry collection, Hard Child (Copper Canyon Press, 2017), was shortlisted for the International Griffin Poetry Prize. Her previous collection, No Object (Saturnalia, 2013), received the Great Lakes College Association New Writers Award. Known for her dark, laconic, and occasionally self-deprecating humor, Shapero’s poetry has been said to resemble stand-up comedy, weaving her poems into subtle set-ups and punchlines that build from and interact with one another. Her work, which has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Poetry, and elsewhere, has also been included in installations by the artist Ann Hamilton at the Park Avenue Armory, the Fabric Workshop and Museum, and the Dell Medical School at UT Austin. She lives outside Boston, Massachusetts.

Read an Excerpt

Five by Seven

Really, when people have photographs of themselves displayed on their walls, I just assume they have died and it is their ghosts who’ve invited me over, their ghosts with whom
I’m sharing a meal, making small talk about all the bodies and trash on Mount Everest.
Oh lacquered ghosts, so high on your own finished triptych of fetes and feats and the corresponding assurance you go unforgotten—let’s

go out. From the recent restaurant boom, infer a citywide uptick in rage-ravaged homes.
People want new spots to fight, to squall and snipe, lose their appetites, be brought the chalkboard special, not touch it,
see it whisked to the kitchen and scraped out back for a dog to eat, but that’s cool—dogs have to eat, too—


Sunshower

Some people say the devil is beating his wife. Some people say the devil is pawing his wife. Some people say the devil is doubling down on an overall attitude of entitlement toward the body of his wife. Some people say the devil won’t need to be sorry,
as the devil believes that nothing comes after this life. Some people say that in spite of the devil’s public,
longstanding, and meticulously logged disdain for the health and wholeness of his wife, the devil spends all day, every day, insisting grandly and gleefully on his general pro-woman ethos, that the devil truly considers himself to be an unswayed crusader: effortlessly magnetic,
scrupulous, gracious, and, in spite of the devil’s several advanced degrees,
a luminous autodidact. Some people say calm down; this is commonplace.
Some people say calm down;
this is very rare. Some people say the sun is washing her face. Some people say in Hell, they’re having a fair.


from Don't Spend It All In One Place

Give them what they want. But what do they want?
Ultimately, I find this place to be a fully predatory city. Electric fences, post-op sepsis, the insult
NO ONE EVER SAW HER FIRST. You can’t even stand and wait for your train without someone suffering from an acute case of undercongratulation praying for you to shuffle to the edge of the platform and teeter over, so that he might intervene and be seen as a savior. Moving through an intersection the other day, I passed a young child who was deep in a screaming fit: NO NO NO NO, and I suddenly suspected the child was me—the child I used to be,
transported somehow ahead and horrified to find what the future brings. She did have my eyes.

Table of Contents

Man at His Bath 3

My Hair Is My Thing 7

The Suggested Face for Sorry g Lying Is Getting 8

Five by Seven 10

California 11

A Space to Train and Exit 13

Magpie 14

Tea 15

Have at It 16

Tomatoes Ten Ways 17

They Said It Couldn't Be Done 18

It for Me 19

Sunshower 20

Green 21

Totally under the Water 22

Long Wedding 23

The Greatest Two Minutes in Sports 25

You Missed a Spot 26

Weekend 27

Stoop 28

Flowers Would Have Killed You 29

The Lone Acceptable Application of Daylight 30

Say It to My Face 31

Good Share 32

It Used to Be We Had to Go to War 34

During the Strife, My Sisters 35

And Also with You 36

Good Description 37

The Beach 38

Don't Spend It All in One Place 41

Other Things, If Not More Urgent Things 57

Some Toxin 58

Fake Sick 59

Home, Followed by Tall Buildings 60

And Stay Out 61

Ohio on TV 62

Fifty 64

Pennsylvania 65

Acknowledgments 67

About the Author 69

Editorial Reviews

02/15/2021

The poems in the sharp, eloquent third collection from Shapero (Hard Child) juxtapose the world as it is and as it could be. Shapero has established herself as one of the foremost poets of wit, candor, and verve, capturing the pain of being alive, where “even worse is the other/ way around.” In one poem, she writes, “I was thinking of the times/ I have attempted to exit my body,” before contextualizing, “I was thinking/ of how I’d had nowhere to go.” These poems sit in the “absence of Heaven,” a state of nowhere in which nearly every decision is a wrong decision. They capture this mood with biting humor: “What are our choices,” she asks, “might I suggest/ LESS IS MORE against MORE IS MORE?” These poems are unsparing in their critiques of the self, the greed of capitalism, and violence; yet there is tenderness and human solidarity, a wish for something better, even if it feels like the odds are stacked against humanity, “Unseen as we are in this life.” Shapero is a poet willing to go deep into the collective heart of humanity to find the truth, however it humors or hurts. No book captures the loneliness of witness like this one. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

"These poems feel chatty, associative, almost tossed off despite their sonic tightness, carefully arranged to sound improvised. Shapero aspires to replace the obvious architectonics of other poetry with her own appalled, off-the-cuff humour, the tapestry of everyday experience with a series of sharp blades. That means the cuts are the tapestry."—Stephanie Burt, London Review of Books

“Natalie Shapero is the poet I’d most like to have at a dinner party, and Popular Longing is a perfect example of why. Her sharp observations of human weirdness are just unparalleled. Popular Longing is cutting, clever, and a criticism of modern culture. Shapero knows no bounds here, and it makes for a remarkable read.” —Electric Lit

“Here the oddities of our very human lives are keenly observed in bright lyric perfection… Shapero’s insights are bold, metaphysical, and serpentine… 'Don’t Spend It All in One Place,' the book’s longest poem, is a masterful romp through Shapero’s quick-witted and asymmetrical mode of thinking. It’s funny and serious all at once, like so much of our lives.”—Booklist
“In Popular Longing, Griffin Prize shortlistee Natalie Shapero confronts life’s absurdities with decided brio.”—Library Journal

From the Publisher