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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.
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New & Noteworthy Poetry, From Beethoven to Armageddon
March 2, 2021
Recent poetry of interest:
WOUND FROM THE MOUTH OF A WOUND: Poems, by torrin a. greathouse. (Milkweed, paper, $16.) The poems in this debut collection methodically subvert traditional notions of beauty, to show how they leave no room for a “transgender cripple-punk” like the author.
POPULAR LONGING, by Natalie Shapero. (Copper Canyon, paper, $17.) Shapero’s giddy, acerbic work is alert to the comedy of disconnection; in one poem, the speaker assumes that a recent restaurant boom is evidence that people “want new spots to fight, to squall / and snipe, lose their appetites.”
BEETHOVEN VARIATIONS: Poems on a Life, by Ruth Padel. (Knopf, $27.) Padel, whose previous collections include a verse biography of Darwin, here gives Beethoven the same treatment, summoning his “holy zone / of concentration” where “three descending semitones / say there is answer in the world.”
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.