PositiveOn the SeawallShapero herself is a graduate of the law school at the University of Chicago. You can hear the poetry of crime even in some of Shapero’s titles which could be Jim Thompson novels like \'Lying is Getting,\' \'Flowers Would Have Killed You,\' \'The Suggested Face for Sorry,\' and so on. You can feel it in her sonnet sequence on the Gardner heist and violent assaults on artworks. But most of all, you can hear it around the noir edges of her language, persona and worldview ... Shapero’s technique is to leave herself open...to criticism. We live in an era where people are afraid of criticism, of approbation, so it can feel strange to explicate how a poet who is for a certain kind of toughness conducts herself ... Shapero is always in her poems treating her semi-detachable moods clinically, responsibly, comically, reliving their rage and traumas at times, but also just acceptingly, and she is not going to fit into a paradigm of style like wisecracking noir, which could constrain her ultimate gift for emotional precision, all the more moving because she is not interested in niceness.
