With deadpan humor, quick turns, and blunt logic, Natalie Shapero’s third collection moves nimbly between the lines of power structures—linguistic, personal, political— to expose the loneliness of our contemporary realities. Popular Longing takes on, among other topics, art markets, consumer desire, privatization, NIMBYism, passive aggression, sex, violence, and the mythology of California. Shapero moves from a whisper to a scream and back again, in the time it takes for the neighborhood dog to take a rat in its jaws and bite.