Stay Dead

Visual mediums—paintings and film—collide with Natalie Shapero’s unflinching poems as they explore method acting, abstract expressionism, and space exploration in her fourth poetry collection, Stay Dead. With epigraphs from Claude Monet, several references to abstract expressionist Mark Rothko’s work, and commentary on the practice and theory of acting, Shapero explores what it means to be an artist in a neoliberal, late-stage capitalistic world and how creative production is received by a consumerist society. The collection seeks to raise unsettled and unsettling questions, asking who is permitted intense expression and when, and how that expression might be captured, co-opted, and capitalized on by cultural and political institutions. Shapero asks: At what point is expression no longer an earnest extension of the self, but simply a product to consume? Readers are guided into a deep self-awareness of their own place in the entertainment industry. The collection is “A cautionary tale about painting / oneself right out of one’s own life.” An artist or not, Shapero’s cutting, sardonic, humorous voice will place readers into a method acting dream-reality.