Popular Longing - by Natalie Shapero (Paperback)

About the Book

With her sharp, punchy, sardonic wit, Natalie Shapero's Popular Longing explores sadnesses and subordinations in their myriad forms.

Book Synopsis

With her sharp, punchy, sardonic wit, Natalie Shapero's Popular Longing explores sadnesses and subordinations in their myriad forms.

Review Quotes

Praise for Popular Longing

"These poems feel chatty, associative, almost tossed off despite their sonic tightness, carefully arranged to sound improvised. Shapero aspires to replace the obvious architectonics of other poetry with her own appalled, off-the-cuff humour, the tapestry of everyday experience with a series of sharp blades. That means the cuts are the tapestry."-Stephanie Burt, London Review of Books

"Natalie Shapero is the poet I'd most like to have at a dinner party, and Popular Longing is a perfect example of why. Her sharp observations of human weirdness are just unparalleled. Popular Longing is cutting, clever, and a criticism of modern culture. Shapero knows no bounds here, and it makes for a remarkable read."--Electric Lit

"Here the oddities of our very human lives are keenly observed in bright lyric perfection. . . . Shapero's insights are bold, metaphysical, and serpentine. . . . 'Don't Spend It All in One Place, ' the book's longest poem, is a masterful romp through Shapero's quick-witted and asymmetrical mode of thinking. It's funny and serious all at once, like so much of our lives."--Booklist

"These poems are as witty as they are wise. Shapero dismantles the mundane violence of everyday life with aplomb. If you can't shake the absurdity of contemporary society, Popular Longing will feel like home."--New York Public Library

"In Popular Longing, Griffin Prize shortlistee Natalie Shapero confronts life's absurdities with decided brio."--Library Journal

About the Author

Natalie Shapero is the current Professor of the Practice of Poetry at Tufts University in Massachusetts. Her most recent poetry collection, Hard Child (Copper Canyon Press, 2017), was shortlisted for the International Griffin Poetry Prize. Her previous collection, No Object (Saturnalia, 2013), received the Great Lakes College Association New Writers Award. Known for her dark, laconic, and occasionally self-deprecating humor, Shapero's poetry has been said to resemble stand-up comedy, weaving her poems into subtle set-ups and punchlines that build from and interact with one another. Her work, which has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Poetry, and elsewhere, has also been included in installations by the artist Ann Hamilton at the Park Avenue Armory, the Fabric Workshop and Museum, and the Dell Medical School at UT Austin. She lives outside Boston, Massachusetts.