Longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry 2025. In her fourth collection, Stay Dead, Natalie Shapero examines performance, power, comedy, and despair through the lenses of method acting and abstract expressionism.

‘In Stay Dead, Natalie Shapero leads us out from the wreckage into the brightly smouldering aftermath more precariously mortal, more humane and attentive and vivid than before. Her relentlessly dark, metaphysical poems of dying and not dying, surviving and not surviving, are as bleakly comical as they are halting. Shapero always keeps her lyrics effortlessly turning, veering her syntax, squinting and tacking – from abstract paintings, movie quotations and the private ownership of coastal redwoods, to the ocean hurling itself onto the rocks, the past, the afterlife, the dead that stay dead, and the dead that don’t. Shapero leaves a huge dent in oblivion to show us that it’s real. ’ — Jack Underwood