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.” Continue reading →