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Copper Canyon Press

Stay Dead

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*2025 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD Longlist*


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."
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Book Details

ISBN:
9781556597121
Binding:
Paperback
Pages:
104
Authors:
Natalie Shapero
Publisher:
Copper Canyon Press
Published Date:
2025-09-09
Language:
English

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About the poet: Natalie Shapero

Natalie Shapero (born in Chester, Pennsylvania) is an American poet known for dark wit, sardonic intelligence, and formally restrained engagement with mortality, motherhood, and contemporary American life. She earned a BA from Johns Hopkins University, an MFA in Poetry from Ohio State University, and a JD from the University of Chicago. She is the author of No Object (Saturnalia Books, 2013), winner of the Great Lakes College Association New Writers Award; Hard Child (Copper Canyon Press, 2017), shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize; and Popular Longing (Copper Canyon Press, 2021). Her poems appear in The New Yorker, Poetry, and The Kenyon Review. She has received an NEA Literature Fellowship and a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, and teaches at the University of California, Irvine.

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Stay Dead

Regular price $17.00
Sale price $17.00 Regular price $22.00