Stay Dead

"It’s good to laugh when the world is crumbling – maybe it’s even better to laugh about the crumbling of the world. “I had to make sure/ I would not leave the world with my feelings/ unfinished,” writes Natalie Shapero in a book about death that is nonetheless exuberant. Gathering images from the products and the practices of film, of visual art, Shapero claws her way word-by-electric-word through troubles both personal and public. These poems often seem to start by giving up, but they find their way to something that is, if not hope, then a kind of determined cousin to it: “I was trying/ not to die. I’LL DIE WHEN I’M DEAD.”"