Stay Dead by Natalie Shapero Online Launch

Please join us via zoom on Monday 1st September at 7pm to celebrate the launch of Natalie Shapero's fourth collection, Stay Dead — with poetry from Natalie and guest poet, Prageeta Sharma, hosted by Anthony Anaxagorou of Out-Spoken Press.

About Stay Dead

In her fourth collection, Stay Dead, Natalie Shapero examines performance, power, comedy, and despair through the lenses of method acting and abstract expressionism.

‘In Stay Dead, Natalie Shapero leads us out from the wreckage into the brightly smouldering aftermath more precariously mortal, more humane and attentive and vivid than before. Her relentlessly dark, metaphysical poems of dying and not dying, surviving and not surviving, are as bleakly comical as they are halting. Shapero always keeps her lyrics eff ortlessly turning, veering her syntax, squinting and tacking – from abstract paintings, movie quotations and the private ownership of coastal redwoods, to the ocean hurling itself onto the rocks, the past, the afterlife, the dead that stay dead, and the dead that don’t. Shapero leaves a huge dent in oblivion to show us that it’s real. ’

— Jack Underwood

Buy the book:

Copies of Stay Dead can be pre-ordered here:

https://www.outspokenldn.com/shop/staydead

Natalie Shapero is the author of the poetry collections Popular Longing (Copper Canyon, 2021), Hard Child (Copper Canyon, 2021), and No Object (Saturnalia, 2013), as well as the pamphlet Today Hamlet (Out-Spoken, 2023). Her writing has appeared in The London Review of Books, Granta, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The Nation, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. Her awards include a Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Great Lakes College Association New Writers Award, a finalist designation from the International Griffin Poetry Prize, and an Assets for Artists residency fellowship from The Studios at MassMOCA. A former civil-rights lawyer, she works as an Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine. She lives in Los Angeles.