Shapero, Natalie: Stay Dead

Copper Canyon Press, paperbackPublication Date: September 9, 2025Publisher Marketing: In Stay Dead, Shapero's cutting, unflinching voice reveals the unsettling realities of the entertainment industry fueled by capitalist consumerism. Visual mediums--paintings and film--collide with Natalie Shapero's unflinching poems as they explore method acting, abstract expressionism, and space exploration in her fourth poetry collection, Stay Dead. With epigraphs from Claude Monet, several references to abstract expressionist Mark Rothko's work, and commentary on the practice and theory of acting, Shapero explores what it means to be an artist in a neoliberal, late-stage capitalistic world and how creative production is received by a consumerist society. The collection seeks to raise unsettled and unsettling questions, asking who is permitted intense expression and when, and how that expression might be captured, co-opted, and capitalized on by cultural and political institutions. Shapero asks: At