ARENA
“Keen-witted, caustic, and resolutely dry-eyed, these poems register a collective alarm in which private grief and global dread converge ‘at the pace of adrenaline.’”
ARENA
2019 CSU Poetry Center Open Book Competition, Editor’s Choice
PRAISE FOR ARENA
“Thoughtfully, painfully, bitterly, lovingly, the poems in Lauren Shapiro’s Arena expose how the limits of the unreal become real when one is forced to interrogate a family member’s attempted suicide. But what is interrogated and assimilated and articulated is not just death, mourning, loss, and absence. Rather, in Shapiro’s Arena, there is a crowd witnessing and absorbing an artwork where atrocity, bureaucracy, history, and spectacle merge to form a performance that we are unable to look away from. Shapiro refuses to soften the most powerful blows that prevent us from filtering out the unspeakable as we struggle to live a quotidian life when all that we know explodes. This is a poignant and stunning achievement.”
—DANIEL BORZUTZKY
“Keen-witted, caustic, and resolutely dry-eyed, these poems register a collective alarm in which private grief and global dread converge ‘at the pace of adrenaline.’”
—SUZANNE BUFFAM
“ Is it possible to observe the suffering of others without turning their suffering into spectacle? In Arena, Lauren Shapiro suggests that we can do so whenever we bring ourselves whole to each other, but none of us, Shapiro understands, is whole. And so, instead, we meet as strangers in an arena: “When the crowd quiets it’s to see / the decapitation or just to breathe in, not me.” With great art, and great skill, Shapiro sees through the distracting strangeness of the present moment to the truths about ourselves that the present moment reveals.”
- SHANE MCCRAE
“Lauren Shapiro’s poems frack open the anxiety deep in our bedrock. Arena touches that place where we thought we were safe in our untouchedness. I really love and trust the person in these poems. And the poems themselves are so fluid, fast, dark, witty, and rueful.”
—DARCIE DENNIGAN
Arena insists we share one another’s pain not once, not twice, but over and over again, possibly never-endingly, it insists on memory’s graceful panic of “endless anticipation” while understanding how “destiny was the wound” is necessary. In blocks of deadpan prose and in pain-torn ragged lines, Shapiro never flinches from suffering; no one should read this book without being prepared to be dragged up and down and through the rage and suffering suicide delivers; “there are so many ways / to be angry” simmers underneath every word.
—DARA WIER
ABOUT
LAUREN SHAPIRO
Lauren Shapiro is the author of Easy Math (Sarabande, 2013), which was the winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize and the Debut-litzer Prize for Poetry, as well as Arena (forthcoming in 2020 from the CSU Poetry Center). With Kevin González, she co-edited The New Census: An Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry (Rescue Press, 2013). She has written a chapbook of poems, Yo-Yo Logic (DIAGRAM/New Michigan Press, 2011), and individual poems have appeared in jubilat, Boston Review, Copper Nickel, Beloit Poetry Journal, Bennington Review, Columbia Poetry Review, New Ohio Review, Mississippi Review, Drunken Boat, DIAGRAM, and Forklift, Ohio, among other places. She has translated creative work from Spanish, Italian, Vietnamese, and Arabic into English. She is an associate professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University.
BOOKS
WRITING
SELECTED POEMS
“Getting Older,” Beloit Poetry Journal, 70.1 (2020)
“Temporal,” Beloit Poetry Journal, 70.1 (2020)
“The Memory,” Bennington Review, forthcoming 2020
“That One,” DIAGRAM, 2020
“Cenotaph,” Columbia Poetry Review, 32 (2019): 80.
“Q+A,” Columbia Poetry Review, 32 (2019): 82.
“Spring,” New Ohio Review, 25 (2019): 69.
“The Bodies,” Copper Nickel, 28 (2019): 100.
“Cleanse,” Boston Review, (2018)
“10,000 Dads,” Pittsburgh City Paper, 5 Apr. 2017
“Negative Transfer,” Forklift, Ohio, 34 (2017): 10.
“The Workshop,” Forklift, Ohio, 34 (2017): 63.
“In Context,” Forklift, Ohio, 34 (2017): 158.
“Twinfold,” jubilat, Special Issue (2016): 148.
“Please Mark Any of the Following” jubilat, 25 (2015): 108.
“Am I Crazy?” jubilat, 25 (2015): 106.
“The Kiss,” jubilat, 25 (2015): 107.
“Saturday,” Forklift, Ohio, 30 (2015): 33.
“Patience, Patient,” Forklift, Ohio, 30 (2015): 114.
“Supreme Court Rules Against Women’s Contraceptive Coverage,” Forklift, Ohio, 30 (2015): 50.
“Only Tres Pesos, Señorita,” Forklift, Ohio, 30 (2015): 202.
“I Imagine Your Death,” Propeller, (2015)
“First Snow,” Propeller, (2015)
“Post-Mortem,” Wave Composition, 9 (2015).
“lying on the gurney,” February: An Anthology. February Press (2015): 2.11.
“The Conversation” and commentary, The Poetry Society of America (2013)
“You’re Wearing That?” Mississippi Review, 41.3 (2014): 128.
“Don’t Take It Personally,” Mississippi Review, 41.3 (2014): 130.
“The Polar Bear,” Mississippi Review, 41.3 (2014): 131.
“They Promised Me a Thousand Years of Peace,” VerseDaily, 23 February 2013
“The One Hundreds,” Poetry Daily, 2 March 2013: online.
“Hotel,” jubilat, 21 (2011): 50.
“If You Are Lost, Don’t Move,” jubilat, 21 (2011): 51.
“How I Wrote a Belated Love Letter,” Connotation Press: An Online Artifact (2011)
“First Man Gets the Oyster, Second Man Gets the Shell,” Connotation Press: An Online Artifact (2011)
“A Tediously Slow Realization,” Connotation Press: An Online Artifact (2011)
“The One Hundreds,” Forklift, Ohio, 23 (2011): 63.
“So Much Beauty Turns to Despair in a Hangover,” Forklift, Ohio, 23 (2011): 204.
“Photo Op,” Thermos: 1:5 (2010): 23.
“I’ve Always Wanted to Say This,” Thermos: 1:5 (2010): 24.
“According to the Magazines, Lindsay Lohan is Very Lonely These Days,” Thermos: 1:5 (2010): 25.
“Bent Syllogism,” notnostrums, 3 (2009).
“Botanical Garden,” notnostrums, 3 (2009).
“History Lesson,” notnostrums, 3 (2009).
“Regeneration,” Drunken Boat, 10 (2009)
“Waking Life,” Drunken Boat, 10 (2009)
“ESL Students in Period 1, 8:30-9:50,” Forklift, Ohio, 20 (2009): 85.
“Finale,” Peregrine (2009): 37.
“In the Absence of Metaphor,” Locuspoint (2008)
“A Day in the Life,” Locuspoint (2008)
“Rule Book,” Locuspoint (2008)
“The Confrontation,” Locuspoint (2008)
“The Argument,” Locuspoint (2008)
“Going to Hawaii,” Passages North (2008): 17.
“Learning Curve,” Passages North (2008): 18.
“The First Law of Thermodynamics,” 32 Poems, 6:1 (2008): 16.
“The Conversation,” POOL, 6 (2007): 30.
TRANSLATIONS
“Nude #10,” by Joan Manuel Corcino Font. Poetry Daily, 12 September 2019
“Candor,” by Joan Manuel Corcino Font, jubilat (2019): 15.
“On the Subject of Eyes,” by Joan Manuel Corcino Font, jubilat (2019): 17.
“Nude #10,” by Joan Manuel Corcino Font, jubilat (2019): 19.
“Prologue,” by Joan Manuel Corcino Font, jubilat (2019): 21.
“Downpour,” by Laura Cesarco Eglin, América Invertida: A Bilingual Anthology
of Younger Uruguayan Poets, U. of New Mexico Press (2016): 52-3.
“Agency,” by Laura Cesarco Eglin, América Invertida: A Bilingual Anthology
of Younger Uruguayan Poets, U. of New Mexico Press (2016), pp. 54-5.
“If the Storm Can,” by Laura Cesarco Eglin, América Invertida: A Bilingual Anthology of
Younger Uruguayan Poets, U. of New Mexico Press (2016): 56-7.
“Pasta with Tomato Sauce,” by Laura Cesarco Eglin, América Invertida: A Bilingual Anthology
of Younger Uruguayan Poets, U. of New Mexico Press (2016): 58-9.
“Photogenic,” by Laura Cesarco Eglin, América Invertida: A Bilingual Anthology
of Younger Uruguayan Poets, U. of New Mexico Press (2016): 60-61.
“Photogenic,” “Downpour,” “Agency,” also published in Copper Nickel, 21 (2015): 130-2.
“The Last Bird Burial Master,” by Van Cam Hai, 91st Meridian, 6.1 (2008): 6.