Poetry Reading with Natalie Shapero and Rebecca Morgan Frank

Join Natalie Shapero (Stay Dead) and Rebecca Morgan Frank (Oh You Robot Saints) for a poetry reading at The Book Cellar!

About Stay Dead: 

The politics of labor and performance collide with comedy and tragedy in Natalie Shapero’s fourth poetry collection, Stay Dead. Shapero’s unflinching poems explore theories of acting, discourses of survival, privacy and publicity, power and punchlines, and the language of despair. This work explores how “your death place / is the birthplace you choose.” With appearances by Claude Monet, Mark Rothko, Chris Burden, Studs Terkel, Anthony Bourdain, Gene Kelly, and others, Shapero investigates themes of method acting, abstract expressionism, and the production and commodification of intense expression and raw interiority. She offers sly examinations of labor and housing markets. She interrogates the influence of artists’ material conditions on the work they produce and the culture they shape. With a cutting, sardonic voice, Shapero asks what it means to be a working artist under capitalism; which individuals are permitted earnest extensions of the self; and “whether being born is worth it.”

About Oh You Robot Saints!: 

Part bestiary, part litany, part elegy, Rebecca Morgan Frank’s Oh You Robot Saints! is populated by a strange menagerie of early automata and robots, including octobots and an eighteenth-century digesting duck, set alongside medieval mechanical virgins and robot priests. From a riveting robobee sonnet sequence that links weapons of war and industrial fixes for infertility to a microdrama sketching out a missing Sophocles play on the mythical bronze man, Talos, these muscular poems blur and sing the lines between machines and the divine. This lyrical exploration of the ongoing human desire to create life navigates wonder and grief, joining the uncanny investigation of what it is to be, to make, and to be made.
 

About The Authors: 

Natalie Shapero’s latest book is Stay Dead (2025), longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award and shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, 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). She lives in Los Angeles and teaches writing at UC Irvine. 

Rebecca Morgan Frank is the author of four collections of poems, including Oh You Robot Saints! (2021) and Little Murders Everywhere (2012), a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and her work has appeared such places as The New Yorker and American Poetry Review. She serves on the Board of Directors of the National Book Critics Circle and is an assistant professor at Lewis University.