Hard Child

by Natalie Shapero

Overview

“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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781619321717
Publisher:	Copper Canyon Press
Publication date:	03/21/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	96
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Natalie Shapero: Natalie Shapero has worked as a civil rights lawyer and is currently Professor of the Practice of Poetry at Tufts Universityand an Editor at Large of the Kenyon Review. Her first poetry collection No Object was published by Saturnalia in 2013, and her writing has appeared in The Believer, The New Republic, Poetry, and The Progressive. She lives in Massachusetts.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

The Awl: "Studio"

The Country Dog Review: "Open Road"

Diode: "Was This the Face"

February: "Can't Go Anywhere"

Ghost Proposal: "Former Dancer," "Hot Streak"

Gulf Coast: "Hard Child"

The Hopkins Review: "Person's Ocean," "Screens and Storms"

The Journal: "Winter Injury"

Jubilat: "On Magic," "The Sky"

Kettle Blue Review: "Ten What," "What Will She Go As?"

The Literary Review: "Beauty School," "Monster"

Mantis: "Low Blow" Matter: "Direct Address"

Montreal International Poetry Prize Online: "My Hand and Cold"

The Nation: "Outside Less"

New Republic; "You'd Better Run"

The New Yorker: "Survive Me"

Phantom: "The Mind of Popular Pictures," "Were You Lying Then or Are You Lying Now"

Pinwheel: "Mostly Rasputin," "The Obligatory Making of Amends," "Passing and Violence," "Red"

Ploughshares: "Teacup This"

Poetry: "Not Horses," "You Look Like I Feel"

The Progressive: "Radio Science"

Subtropics: "Absence, That Which Never," "Passion in Public"

Typo: "For Later," "Home Scale," "I Am Not Built for Dead," "Mostly I Don't Want to Have a Son-," "No Radio"

Whiskey Island: "Bath or Escape," "Low Light," "Reformation Window"

Editorial Reviews

02/20/2017
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. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

03/15/2017
In this follow-up to Shapero's debut collection, No Object, you may be tempted to see a lawyer's hand, as many of the poems are litigated with unsparing precision. Indeed, Shapero has a JD from the University of Chicago, not that there is any reason to complain. Rather, the work is searching, and in indelible language, finds connections in a random landscape, as in "Outside Less," worth quoting at length: "I have been outside less. I have taken to saying in the days since my daughter was born—passive, as/ though it were somebody/ else who bore her. And bore her. I also have to saying, as though she were a hole/ I have witnessed a woodpecker force/ through the week, a gape in my neighbor's barn side. I have watched as my daughter knocks,/ woodpecker-like, her searching mouth into my breast. But I don't mean to say she instills in my body an/ absence. What nothing/ assembles within me was already there." Overall, there is an abiding sadness in this work, as it unblinkingly explores birth and death, war and religion, and how we forever fall short. But there are hard flashes of humor, too. VERDICT The best poems here are quietly piercing in tone and language. For most collections.—Iris S. Rosenberg, New York

Library Journal