Professor of the practice Natalie Shapero shares three poems to celebrate National Poetry Month
Poetry isn’t just meant to be read—ideally it’s recited aloud to an audience. These days, of course, that’s out of the question. So to mark National Poetry Month, we asked Natalie Shapero, professor of the practice of poetry in the Department of English, to do what many artists are doing: turn the camera on herself.
Shapero, who has taught poetry at Tufts since 2015 and is editor at large of the Kenyon Review, recites three recent poems: “Flowers Would Have Killed You,” “It for Me,” and “The Suggested Face for ‘Sorry.’”
Author of two books of poetry (Hard Child and No Object), Shapero has published her work in the New Yorker, Poetry, Granta, and other journals. She was recently featured in the Paris Review’s “Poets on Couches” video series.
“A lot of my work explores various modes of indirectness—the ways we talk about things by talking around them, or how we use obfuscation or implication when addressing painful topics,” Shapero told Tufts Now in 2018. “The feeling of needing to make meaning without having the opportunity to say something squarely—I hope readers might feel some of that.”
Taylor McNeil can be reached at taylor.mcneil@tufts.edu.
