Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Stay Dead

Stay Dead

Shapero, Natalie

Paperback

General Poetry

Publisher Price: $17.00

ISBN10: 1556597126
ISBN13: 9781556597121
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
Published: Sep 9 2025
Pages: 104
Weight: 0.35
Height: 0.47 Width: 5.83 Depth: 8.82
Language: English

*2025 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD Longlist*


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


The politics of labor and performance collide with comedy and tragedy in Natalie Shapero's fourth poetry collection, Stay Dead. Shapero's unflinching poems explore theories of acting, discourses of survival, privacy and publicity, power and punchlines, and the language of despair. This work explores how your death place / is the birthplace you choose. With appearances by Claude Monet, Mark Rothko, Chris Burden, Studs Terkel, Anthony Bourdain, Gene Kelly, and others, Shapero investigates themes of method acting, abstract expressionism, and the production and commodification of intense expression and raw interiority. She offers sly examinations of labor and housing markets. She interrogates the influence of artists' material conditions on the work they produce and the culture they shape. With a cutting, sardonic voice, Shapero asks what it means to be a working artist under capitalism; which individuals are permitted earnest extensions of the self; and whether being born is worth it.

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