INSECT ARCHITECTURE

A volume of poems and fables traverses urban malaise.

It’s clear from the first pages that Shapiro’s collection will not be a happy one. In about 50 poems, the author ponders the impact humans have had on the natural environments they have settled as cities. Some of the pieces discuss how people’s presence erodes the homes of other species, displacing flora and fauna with their apartment complexes and cars. Others chastise humanity’s callousness and refusal to admit, let alone rectify, mistakes made because of selfishness and greed. The speakers are constantly ill at ease, ruminating on life’s mundane, but no less draining, grievances of existing in an increasingly technology-driven world. Some of these poems appear to be pegged to the Covid-19 pandemic, as the opening piece, “A Fable About Boxes,” remarks on how some things as simple as a package delivery have become warped and impersonal “when touch first became unsafe.” Others make seminebulous allusions to nature as liberation from the entrapment of humanity’s technological advancements—“Circuitry is cozy in enclosure. Feel the burden of freedom as you exit the binary.” Humans, the poet seems to say, think of their inventions as tangible symbols of their superiority and conquest of the land. But for all their progress, they forget that nature has spent billions of years perfecting its innumerable organisms, that “​​infrastructure is an exertion of consciousness and thumbs but the structure within isn’t dormant. Our engineering is no more definitive than insect architecture.”

Shapiro’s adept works here feel inextricable from the looming threat of climate change and the recent cultural shift toward work and progress. Many seem to question human-made patterns, such as establishing waste management schedules and salting streets in the winter and how people tether themselves to things that make them miserable. The sparse punctuation and clipped lines give many of the longer works an urgent delivery, as if the poet’s speakers are issuing warnings: “In the only open / gates mid social / recession is space / for joggers marking / miles with tombstones.” The familiarity of near-universal images, like concrete-laden neighborhoods, office commutes, and apartments that “must hold / enough people to work off / the cost of living,” takes on a sinister sheen. Boundaries, demarcations, and means of stratification across mind and body come up again and again. Community and its comforts feel increasingly distant, and the worst part is that this is not a dystopian future but the turmoil of the present. The best poems are those told with cool restraint, delivering notions that feel like judgments: “Community must eventually dissemble for rest into pedestrians.” There are some images that occasionally feel overwrought and a few insights that are clouded by abstract language, but Shapiro’s incisive position is clear: “(We have family on these streets. / we are rain, falling with the faith / our gravity will eventually / lead us to unity).”

An astute and unflinching commentary on societal and ecological dysfunctions.