Creating a Preferred Reality

Book Review of Stay Dead

by Natalie Shapero

Copper Canyon Press, 2025 ($17.00)

What do improv comedy and poetry have in common? (Wait for it . . . ) TIMING! Natalie Shapiro’s latest collection Stay Dead delivers in both comedic and poetic skill. Weaving themes of mortality, struggling acting/comedy work, and art history, this book is darkly funny and  poignant. It was longlisted for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize.

In my notes for this review, most of the poems are “about death, and funny” Death is not the end of the story in this book. The real tragedy is survival. While the speaker doesn’t speak explicitly about it, there’s a darkness hinted at in these poems, a man who “kills” (rapes?) the speaker. But we don’t stay in that. We move directly on to what happens after death.

As the book progresses, though, dying isn’t something to always be avoided, but just another stage of, well, life?? And it’s certainly preferable to the speaker than being labeled as a survivor, as we see in the poems below.

What is it the speaker doesn’t want to endure about living? Perhaps it’s because there’s something wearing and exhausting about being alive.

In these poems, life comes with obligations, wear, suffering, boredom, demeaning work, insecurity. But death comes with freedom. Although this sounds a bit like depression, the speaker is very clear on the difference.

“Have You Been Wanting to Go to Sleep and Not Wake Up”

As you can tell from these examples (and there are so many more dog-eared in my copy of this book), the poems in Stay Dead by Natalie Shapero are funny in the smartest way. They are intelligent and fast paced, incorporating darkness, puns, stupid kid jokes, absurd situations. The poems could pass as stand-up comedy in many instances, but also political and societal commentary.

Besides DEATH and its opposite LIVING, the book circles the topics of acting and painting, bringing in art history (particularly life stories and quotes from Rothko and Monet). Just as death is a facade (there are many poems in which the speaker goes on living in some form after death), acting/TV and art are also facades, all ways of pretending life is different, and of creating an alternative to reality. Take the examples of Rothko throughout the book. We first encounter him in the book’s seventh poem, which begins with the speaker contemplating a career in acting, then brings in a quote from Rothko about his preference for painting large pictures because the painter can be found only in larger pictures. This poem sets up a common theme throughout the book—painting and acting as ways to control a life path, told through a third art of poetry. Rothko reappears two poems later, where we hear about his name change, his painter life killing his original self in a way, a point rammed home at the poem’s end. He appears later in another poem about films and acting. And again in a poem about name changes. Monet also appears in several poems, as do stupid kid jokes and puns, colors, movies, all of which give a counterbalance and lightness to the talk of death. They all have the same emotional weight, which is light. We’re all just playing here, just creating a preferred reality.

This book of funny poems about death that are also insightful about the human existence, works because Shapero’s craft game is tight. In spoken improv, a comedian can use timing through pauses and physical gestures. Shapero similarly uses line breaks, capitalization, and sound. Take, for example, the questioning of the point of life, of work, so well expressed in the pacing of “Wrong Line”

Shapero keeps the reader engaged with suspense at every line, a little twist into the next line. We are surprised at the beginning of the second line, the third line. And as the reader is off-center and having to follow the speaker’s lead, the speaker begins to build an argument, one step at a time, until we’re surprised again at the beginning of each of the last two lines of the quote. And, like the lawyer she is, Shapero rests her case while we try to catch up.

Shapero’s poetic skill is further illustrated by the poem “Careful”

Here the line breaks parse out information and create emphasis: the speaker’s ownership of lives, the wonderful undercutting of the first line with the second “like a cat, nine lives. The bad news” and then a twist again, where the bad news is that the lives are almost spent, undercut immediately with “I have to be”—existence delivered as part of the bad news. Then the logic is undercut again by the fact that an actor can die in a show and go on to act in a new show, and that this is good because it suggests death is survivable.

As we have seen, death and survivability are recurrent themes of this collection. Which option is good and which is bad?

Perhaps the message comes down to this: Death is easy. Surviving is hard, with its striving for relevance and creation and meaning. Shapero delivers some of the most timeless and troubling of human perplexities in an extraordinarily palatable and enjoyable collection.

Danielle Hanson is author of The Night Is What It Eats (forthcoming, Elixir Press Prize), Fraying Edge of Sky (Codhill Press Poetry Prize), and Ambushing Water (Finalist, Georgia Author of the Year), and editor of Objects in This Mirror: An Anthology of Legacy (Press 53) and two books of literary criticism. She is Marketing Director for Sundress Publications, Writer-in-Residence at UC Irvine, and Poet Laureate of Costa Mesa, CA.