Hard Child
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
“Shapero writes in an urgent vernacular that flirts, stings, implores and demands with apparent abandon.”—Houston Chronicle
“Shapero’s poetics has real-world import for the way we use language to talk about messy things.”—Volta
Thought-provoking and sardonically expressive, Shapero is a self-proclaimed “hard child”—unafraid of directly addressing bleakness as she continually asks what it means to be human and to bring new life into the world. Hard Child is musical and argumentative, deadly serious yet tinged with self-parody, evoking the spirit of Plath while remaining entirely its own.
From Hot Streak
Actually it’s ridiculous to opine on what kind
of a dog I would be, were I ever a dog, as I don’t
contain within me half enough life to power
a dog. I WOULD BE A DEAD DOG, THAT’S
WHAT KIND, or
maybe a mere industrial object
boasting a low-grade animation, some odd beep
or flicker, like a dryer or a bulb. So, sure, I could
be a reluctant bulb, the only one still offering light
in an otherwise burnt-out fixture bolted
hard to a row house porch. And all those moths,
with no other place to die. Can’t they murder
themselves on someone else?...
Natalie Shapero has worked as a civil rights lawyer and is currently Professor of the Practice of Poetry at Tufts University. Her first poetry collection No Object was published in 2013, and her writing has appeared in The Believer, The New Republic, Poetry, and The Progressive. She lives in Massachusetts.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
As she transitions into parenthood, Shapero (No Object) contemplates the long investments and fleeting attachments humans make in their turmoil-ridden lives, exuding both mischievousness and melancholy while maintaining a sort of crude optimism. Now a new mother, her admission in the title poem that "there isn't one/ human tradition I would choose to carry/ forward" reveals as much about her poetry as her lack of interest in doing things conventionally. For a collection in which God appears so frequently, it's remarkably irreverent. Shapero's humor generally derives from dark places, as in her tendency toward self-deprecation. "I revere all variants/ of the human/ form, save for my own," she writes, "being myself composed in haste and subject to uncoupling." It's less fatalism than recognition of the limits of the individual: "why is any feat/ so drastically diminished by the presence of/ a second coursing bloodstream, second blur/ of facial features?" Her tight, mainly brief poems work autonomously in the collective, sometimes explicitly linking with their neighbors into loose semblances of narrative. And amid unusually lithe movements, Shapero demonstrates an ability to follow observations to unexpected ends (which is perhaps related to her background in law). "I don't/ contain within me half enough life to power/ a dog," Shapero claims, but the evidence in these delightful poems proves otherwise.
