[REVIEW] No Object, by Natalie Shapero

Saturnalia Books

$15.00, 80 pages

 

About that metric America: I mean it.[1]

 

Here we are, laid out in inches. Our literature and our grammar, our wars and our reasons. Our bodies and their intimacies. The spaces between our bodies measured too: sometimes dangerous, sometimes fraught. No Object, the poet Natalie Shapero’s first collection, breaks down this quantified world, one which the speaker must not merely inhabit, but also size, in order to make sense of it. Shapero, currently teaching as a Kenyon Review Fellow at Kenyon University, crafts a collection whose lyric poems leap image-driven from one yardstick to another, against which her speakers measure memory, sex, interpersonal conflict. These poems demand careful attention (I read many several times, slowly, and again, slowly), and unfold more with each read. They deserve the focused assessment they require: they grow, and we must grow with them, as we read.

The speakers of No Object confront death and grieving, and their consideration of this force and its reasons—death caused by nations or people, writ large or small—maintains one of the main tensions of the collection. “Our War” tells of a speaker’s upbringing in a Quaker town, “a peaceful town. / Show us a war, we’d say, and we’ll show you / dust on the beakers. Dust on the hazard suits.” Though peace-loving, this town knows from war, and in wondering about its consequences (“What if our two towns fought each other? Who / would win?”) human nature shows that even the peace-giving know the ends of this game: “In truth, we’d strew their fingers everywhere. / We would take their boys for infantry. / We would take their girls for making more.”

Alongside these images of war, the somber, more local presence of the funeral hangs over many poems in No Object: in “Close Space,” we meet a speaker caretaking for more-loudly-mourning others: “Because I am good at crying?/ alone I watch my cousins’ kids / when there’s a funeral. Spare?/ the pamphlets, prayer and cakes— / it’s better on my own.” And in “No Please After You,” the speaker comes back to her peaceful Quaker town and “…woke to my family yelling / about a neighbor who went to a funeral / and had to call it vacation for HR.?/ What is the world, they said. I said I agree.” In this poem, as in “Our War” and many others in No Object, a consideration of death evolves into a consideration of sex (also dangerous, also skirting lines of just/unjust, moral/immoral), as later the speaker unfolds the story of this funeral:

…The funeral was a friend,
shot in a crab shack by the man whose wife
he was screwing. Can’t please everyone,
I always say, then try to. A long ago

boyfriend told me I could find success
in porn, not that I have a dynamo body
or anything, but because I am like a child,
and a high percentage of men are attracted to kids,
more than you would think.

And here, the danger of this close contact, of measuring bodies, creeps in: we now know our enemy up close, by the yard. No Object considers sex as a version of this sizing-up, one in which the speakers leave themselves open to others’ assessment, left to reckon with the results. In the long poem “Four Fights,” we meet a speaker engaged in debate with Woody Allen:

(point) To stop a crime in progress, racking the action is often enough.
(counterpoint) Woody Allen: NOTHING WORTH KNOWING CAN BE UNDERSTOOD WITH THE MIND—
EVERYTHING REALLY VALUABLE HAS TO ENTER
YOU THROUGH A DIFFERENT OPENING.
So much dark
I would like to be kept in…

 

The speaker’s reluctance to parse Allen—to know what it means to receive something of value in this manner and to wish to not-know—speaks to the collection’s evocative and, at times, more sinister complications of sex. The long poem “hot (normal)” shows us more about this darkness, as “The ex dragged me in nothing?/ but an overlarge shirt across the carpet floor, rug burns // on my backside. Splotch means an animal’s impure.” The marking, proof of the sullied: something quantifiable and irreversible, impossible to deny.

In the end, the speakers of No Object remain ambiguous about the consequences of our wants: about this desire to know our wants to the inch, even if it kills us. We find ourselves, as we read No Object, both yearning and afraid to know the edge of our own darkness. We begin to understand the implications of seeing our “metric America” as a place where to know exactly means you know exactly what to fear, as in the speaker of “Four Fights’s” final spar with Woody Allen:

…and how
many times have we all seen fucking Manhattan?

In the end, he gets with the teenage girl

and we really don’t know how to feel.

 

***

Rachel Mennies is the author of The Glad Hand of God Points Backwards, winner of the Walt McDonald First-Book Prize in Poetry, and the chapbook No Silence in the Fields. Her poems have appeared in Indiana Review, DIAGRAM, Handsome, and other literary journals, and have been reprinted at Poetry Daily.