Hard Child by Natalie Shapero

Abstract

Reviewed by: Hard Child by Natalie Shapero Emma Bogdonoff (bio) Natalie Shapero, Hard Child (Copper Canyon Press, 2017), 96 pp. Natalie Shapero's second collection, Hard Child, is a ferocious book. Darkly funny and incisive, it demands that the reader consider motherhood alongside tragedies both personal and public, alongside war and violence and suicide. In the first of the book's two parts, the child is hypothetical—a list of names, a hope for a daughter rather than a son, a "blip in utero" who can suffer from the mother's traumas. In the second part, the child is born, but still we see her only fleetingly, her existence often made most notable through her absence. To have a daughter, Hard Child suggests, is to live with the specter of her loss. To bring a child into this world requires a reckoning with its hardest realities. Hard Child dives headfirst into the opening poem, where Shapero's speaker rehearses baby names, saying she "made two lists: one if she's born breathing, / one if not. The second list was longer." The collection's title poem, which immediately follows, talks back to the first: So I had two lists of names for a girl, sowhat. The president's allowed tohave two speeches, in case the hostagecomes home in a bag. There's something defiant in this comparison, in its enjambed "so / what." Why, Shapero seems to ask, is it macabre for a mother to consider a worst-case scenario but not for a president to do the same? The dialogue between [End Page 457] the first two poems also sets a precedent: the poems are part of a larger whole even when they leap between seemingly unrelated topics, from the Challenger space shuttle disaster to Schindler's List to x-ray vision to the nerve endings in a turtle's shell. This ability to find significance in the most minute of details is particularly manifest in "Not Horses": What I adore is not horses, with their moderndomestic life span of 25 years. What I adoreis a bug that lives only one day, especially ifit's a terrible day, a day of train derailment orchemical lake or cop admits to cover-up, a daywhen no one thinks of anything else, least of allthat bug. Shapero possesses a comedian's sense of timing and tension. The strangeness of the negation "not horses" gives way to the more commonplace phrasing of "what I adore is a bug." But the oddity of this sentiment pushes back against any familiarity or comfort, keeping the reader perpetually off balance. The details of the poem are humorous in their hyper-specificity, but their humor has a sharp edge, perfectly capturing the way our culture fixates on the disaster of a given moment, whether "chemical lake" or "cop . . . cover-up," before moving on to the next day's disasters. The poem ends with Shapero's speaker saying she wishes her dog "could have a single day of language, / so that I might reassure her don't be afraid— / our whole world is dead and so can do you no harm." This preoccupation with our dead world and human harm pervades nearly every poem, although Shapero's speaker repeatedly tries to deny her interest in the past, growing more insistent in every iteration. "I typically hate discussing the past," she says, early on, which becomes "I hardly think of the past" a few pages later, and finally, "I swear to God I hardly think of the past." But the past is indifferent to this insistence, finding a way into so many of Shapero's poems. She touches on slavery, speaking of her fear of "burial / beside a hateful tree," referring briefly to the history of lynching in the United States. She circles repeatedly around the Holocaust—"the great terror we're ordered to remember"—finding it in the least expected places, so that we begin to feel the magnetism of this kind of horror, the way the mind can't help but return and return to it. She touches on the Vietnam War, mass shootings, environmental destruction. "My greatest fear / is...