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    Hard Child
    Hard Child
    Hard Child
    Ebook84 pages54 minutes

    Hard Child

    By Natalie Shapero

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    About this ebook

  • Shapero is a young poet with a sharp, compelling voice
  • Earned a law degree from University of Chicago
  • Served as a fellow with Americans United for Separation of Church and State
  • Writings have appeared in The Believer, The New Republic, Poetry, The Progressive
    • LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCopper Canyon Press
    Release dateMar 21, 2017
    ISBN9781619321717
    Hard Child

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    • 3/5
      There's a darkness and a well-reasoned, descriptively clear sense of anger in these poems. The anger however is tempered by an underlying sense of humor and, ultimately, a sense of compassion. But, then, maybe that's just me... "... the dinner/ of neighbors at which man I never/ had met before said "I don't fear dying"--/ "look at the past, people have been dying forever, and--"/ then he stopped and shook his head--/ "I drank too much. I was almost saying/ that people have died forever and all/ of them survived, but of course"--he made/ a hard laugh--"God, of course they didn't survive." (Brian)

    Book preview

    Hard Child - Natalie Shapero

    PART 1

    My Hand and Cold

    Of surgeons putting their knives to erroneous

    body parts, stories abound. So can you really blame

    my neighbor for how, heading into the operation,

    he wrote across his good knee NOT THIS KNEE?

    The death of me: I’m never half so bold. You will

    feel, the doctor said, my hand and cold—

    and I thought of the pub quiz question: Which three

    countries are entirely inside of other countries?

    I bought the bound ONE THOUSAND NAMES

    FOR BABY, made two lists: one if she’s born breathing,

    one if not. The second list was longer. So much

    that I might call her, if she were never to bear

    the name, never turn to it, suffer shaming, mull its

    range and implications, blame it, change it, move

    away to San Marino, Vatican City, Lesotho.

    Hard Child

    So I had two lists of names for a girl, so

    what. The president’s allowed to

    have two speeches, in case the hostage

    comes home in a bag. The geese

    in the metropark don’t want

    for bread crumbs, despite the signs

    proclaiming the land provides them all

    they need. I was a hard child, by which

    I mean I was callous from the start.

    Even now, were I to find myself, after

    a grand disease or blast, among the pasty

    scattering of survivors, there isn’t one

    human tradition I would choose to carry

    forward. Not marking feast days, not

    assembling roadside shrines, not marrying

    up, not researching the colloquialism

    STATEN ISLAND DIVORCE, not

    representing paste pearls as the real

    things, not recounting how the advent

    of photography altered painting,

    soured us on the acrylic portrait, thrust us

    toward the abstract, sent us seeking

    to capture in oil that which film would

    never be wasted on: umbrella stands,

    unlovely grates, assorted drains, body casts.

    I typically hate discussing the past

    and treasure the option, rarer and rarer,

    to turn from it, as when K.’s twins

    were born and one of them

    nearly died—I don’t even remember which,

    that’s how much they got better.

    Absence, That Which Never

    stops appearing. A seabound creature once believed

    to be a single body is actually a thousand small

    fish, stuck together and sucking.

    You will never hear me disparage this arrangement,

    being myself composed in haste and subject to uncoupling.

    I, too, am put together to come apart.

    A bird screams out my window like an alarm I have

    set to notify me when a bird is there.

    I cannot say what everyone means

    when they emphasize that the faulty ring

    on the Challenger cost nine hundred dollars only. I never

    wanted to be an astronaut, never

    asked for any

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