**2025 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD Longlist**
**2025 NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD Longlist**
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.”
ISBN: 9781556597121
Format: Paperback
“There’s chaos in Natalie Shapero’s 2025 National Book Award-longlisted poetry collection Stay Dead—chaos that reflects the modern political and social world to which she’s responding. In one poem, ‘Nightstand,’ the speaker looks to finally read a book about trauma and recovery, but is constantly interrupted by tornado drills, her dog, her doorbell, and several other small and large violations. The tension rises, and the ironic poem ultimately ends before the chaos can settle, leaving readers to sit with that discomfort. Shapero’s speaker often defies conventions of grammar, embodying chaos on the phrase level. ‘Bandages stocked in the padlocked aisle, claim denial, bird spikes, rent hikes,’ Shapero lists in another poem, then asks, ‘Why wouldn’t I want more of what God made?’ Her humor is balanced by earnestness—musing on whether being born is ‘worth it,’ while in the same breath taking seriously what it means to be a writer in our tumultuous time: ‘I had to make sure/ I would not leave the world with my feelings/ unfinished.'”—Rebecca Schneid, Time Magazine 100 Must-Read Books of 2025
“It’s good to laugh when the world is crumbling—maybe it’s even better to laugh about the crumbling of the world. ‘I had to make sure/ I would not leave the world with my feelings/ unfinished,’ writes Natalie Shapero in a book about death that is nonetheless exuberant. Gathering images from the products and the practices of film, of visual art, Shapero claws her way word-by-electric-word through troubles both personal and public. These poems often seem to start by giving up, but they find their way to something that is, if not hope, then a kind of determined cousin to it: ‘I was trying/ not to die. I’LL DIE WHEN I’M DEAD.'”—Craig Morgan Teicher, NPR “Books We Love 2025”
“A darkly witty meditation on mortality.”—Guardian
“Stay Dead by Natalie Shapero assumes apocalyptic means and their strange depictions, including American capitalism. Spanning the necessity of performance, the guarding of art, and the ubiquity of plastics, Shapero’s poems never relax, never let up. As in high comedy, what can be perceived as breaks are not minor lines but controlled moments that build tension towards where attention leads next.”—Poetry Northwest, Favorites Autumn 2025
“Natalie Shapero, in Stay Dead, writes about the miseries of making art and being alive in a way that makes me want to make more art and be more alive.”—Denise S. Robbins, Cap Times, Best Reads of 2025
“. . .ACTING [is] in many ways the discovery and engine for Shapero. . . . In a book this self-aware, over-the-top performance becomes a framework for thinking about how poems can connect us with others by making identity a variable that is produced in the spark of connection between the speaker and the reader. It makes the production of language and selves a shared activity. ACTING, then, becomes a way of defeating alienation by interpreting and entering others’ lives. Doing so, it unmasks the kinds of soul-crushing performances capitalism already demands of us by magnifying it.”—Noah Warren, Quarterly West