Too Large and Looming

TSB’s Poet Laureate series returns. This month’s poet: Natalie Shapero

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Those of you who read The Small Bow newsletter regularly know that poetry has been an important part of my recovery. Every morning, I read a poem as part of my daily journal and reading routine. This began in 2017, when I was working my way through early sobriety. I discovered a poem that I loved — Stephen Dunn’s “The Inheritance.” From there, I began to seek out more contemporary stuff, poems that I read for pure enjoyment. Poems that offered me recognizable worlds and helped me access some of the disorienting feelings I was navigating in early sobriety.

In order to better promote poetry and the poets who write it on TSB, I’m starting a monthly series called “TSB’s Poet Laureate Club” where I’ll feature one poet per month whose work I dig and have found an excellent complement to my recovery.

This month’s poet laureate is Natalie Shapero. Natalie’s fourth collection of poetry, Stay Dead (Copper Canyon Press, 2025) was published this month.

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Nightstand

by Natalie Shapero

*****

I keep picking up the book about trauma and recovery, but right
when I get to the end of section one, the door rings, the dog pukes,
the heater blows, fraud alert, tornado drill, get out
here fast, you gotta see this truck that ignored the height sign
on the underpass and now it’s lodged like an overlarge pill
in the throat of the off-ramp, tangling the city where I poison
myself with the past, cough it up, cough it up—

—from Granta

*****

"The book about trauma and recovery" referenced in this poem is Judith Herman's Trauma and Recovery, one of a group of buzzy psychology books that rode a wave of renewed popularity during the pandemic. I, too, read them. I'd had the actual experience of continually getting interrupted while reading, both by time-sensitive tangible tasks that had to be completed and by more general mental preoccupations that were derailing me, and so this poem sort of started as a joke about how, you know, I'm perpetually re-entering the trauma part and I never get to the recovery.... In Boston, where I lived for a while, there's this thing that happens regularly at the beginning and then again at the end of the school year. There are so many colleges in Boston that student move-in and move-out weekends are these huge events experienced by everyone who lives there, whether you're a college student or not. And there's a particular road with low-clearance underpasses where somebody always doesn't read the signage and gets their moving truck stuck. I just thought that was a pretty tidy metaphor for living with hauntedness and trying to pretend it's fine....you have a vehicle full of your entire life and you're just flooring it around the city and at a certain point you're going to have to reckon with the fact that it's literally too much -- too large and looming -- for the roads available to you, and now what are you gonna do, now that you're stuck, and stuck in public, and you've jammed up everyone behind and around you.

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Natalie Shapero’s latest book is Stay Dead (2025), published in the U.S. by Copper Canyon Press and in the U.K. by Out-Spoken Press. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, The Nation, and elsewhere. She is the author of the previous poetry collections Popular Longing (2021), Hard Child (2017), and No Object (2013), and she has performed at The Pulitzer Arts Foundation, The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s, and elsewhere. She lives in Los Angeles and teaches writing at UC Irvine.

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