Five Fatal Mistakes In Bullish Development forbes.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from forbes.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Todd Lazarski has been a contributing writer at the Shepherd Express since 2004. He has written for Paste, Eater, Offbeat, and Time Out New York. His first novel, Make the Road by Walking, was published by Red Giant Books in 2016.
Throwback Thursday 'Dance With Me' by 112 (2001) hot1047.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from hot1047.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Pick up a book of contemporary poetry, and you are likely to find either personal recollections, observations of nature, a focus on race or sexuality or melancholy introspection. You are not likely to find references to councilmen on the take, polluted rivers, financial speculation and continuous war.
Popular Longing
, the third and latest book of poetry by Natalie Shapero, contains all these things. Its reflection of contemporary social reality, and of the effects that this reality has on our personal lives, is bracingly vivid.
Difficult to find in
Popular Longing is any endorsement of identity politics. The universities (where most contemporary poets have careers) strongly promote this reactionary tendency as part of “progressive” politics. Although she teaches at Tufts University in the Boston area, Shapero does not follow this trend.
Oftentimes, those unsayables involve uncomfortable truths about our capitalist society. And in her new book,
Popular Longing, poet Natalie Shapero takes a blunt, funny look at the things we d prefer to avoid. A lot of what I try to do in my work is write poems that are in conversation with the ways in which we don t talk about things in a straightforward way, Shapero says. The way in which we talk around difficult subjects or taboo subjects.
Using her sharp wit, Shapero looks at how we often use our own wit, joking about things that are too uncomfortable for regular conversation.