Another wintry storm Friday

MPR News helps you turn down the noise and build shared understanding. Turn up your support for this public resource and keep trusted journalism accessible to all. 

Turn Up Your Support

One thing most poets are not afraid of is saying what cannot be said.

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.

"The strategy of the poems is to sort of use irony to hit things from the side and use jokes in ways that make the poems potentially sadder than they would be if they didn't have humor in them," she says.

So if the poems in “Popular Longing” make you feel bad, Shapero says that's the point.

"I want [the book] to try on different unhelpful ways of looking at the world as a way of making explicit different postures that we're invited to assume and different assumptions that we're invited to make," she says.

Consider this excerpt from her poem "Five by Seven":

Here, with a layer of humor enhancing the performativity of human nature, Shapero exposes common selfishness.

"It is a task of living in our world to be cognizant of the ways in which we're invited, again and again to feel like the real work of our lives is to take care of ourselves rather than to look outward," she says.

This exists, also, in the way most of us romanticise the past and pathologize the aging body.

In her long poem, "Don't Spend It All in One Place", she writes:

What are we nostalgic for? Shapero implies that it is the idea of ourselves we love the most — the notion that we are masterpieces, and that our lives are important.

And for her it's important to look at how, on both personal and societal levels, the past can actually be a place of great discomfort. "I want to think about the reasons why there's no need to return there and where we should be looking — is forward," she says.

This longing for our past, or the idea of ourselves, doesn't make us bad people, though. Instead, it's capitalism that is bad, in how it makes us perform our lives to its benefit.

"And that is at the root of the unpleasantness that takes hold in these poems and won't let go," she says.

By exposing our performative urges as something to be wary of, Shapero invites us to consider the privilege of our circumstances and the capitalist root of our desires. Perhaps what we should long for, then, is the ability to see our lives for what they really are. 

Arts and Culture

The Thread® - Books and Literary News

Jeevika Verma

Author

In her third collection of poems, Natalie Shapero takes a blunt, funny look at the uncomfortable realities of life under capitalism. She says her work engages with the things people don't talk about.

'Popular Longing' digs into everything we'd rather leave unsaid

Go Deeper.

Like this?

News you can use in your inbox