Hard Child

Natalie Shapero

Natalie Shapero’s Hard Child is a necessary companion for a world filled with ambiguity. Possessing rapid-fire comedic timing, Shapero touches on subjects such as religion, perpetual war, birth, and death—exposing humanity’s often faulty sense of what’s important and displaying a willingness to self-incriminate. These poems exhibit an expansive, searching sensibility that balks at the standard-issue hopes and fears of modern American culture.

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ISBN: 9781556595097

Format: Paperback

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Survive Me

It wasn’t for love of having 

children that I had a child.
Rather, I simply didn’t know how a person 

could cross, fully shoeless, a bed of coals
and not burn, and I needed 

someone to pass this to.
I needed my obtuseness to survive me. 

But I never accounted for our thwarting era.
Every day, the paper 

runs a remembrance
of a child, the notice struggling to sing the few 

years lived: He never sketched the Earth without
its hatch of latitudes. She did 

not like to try new foods.

About the Author

Natalie Shapero’s writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The London Review of Books, The Paris Review, The Nation, and other journals. Her most recent book, Stay Dead, is longlisted for the National Book Award. She is also the author of the poetry collections Popular Longing (2021), Hard Child (2017), No Object (2013), and she has performed at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, the Poetry Project at St. Marks, and elsewhere. She lives in Los Angeles and teaches writing at UC Irvine.

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Reviews

“The poems in Natalie Shapero’s Hard Child come as close as lyric poems can to perfection… She teaches us how to retain the self without disappearing into the object we behold. She holds herself at various distances from the thing considered. She drives us toward a view and back again. This is how to write a lyric poem.” —Judges’ citation, Griffin Poetry Prize shortlist, 2018