Insect Architecture

Highlighting the daily realities of intersectional identity, Alex Wells Shapiro's Insect Architecture examines the environments - urban, built, literary, implied, or denied - where the poet might find a place to thrive as a mixed-race person. This debut collection boldly takes on pressing social issues, advocating for the hope promised by density, whether of population or poetic construction. In doing so, Shapiro complicates the boundaries between personal spaces, between individuals and community. It is within such density - by literal abutments, inside walls, on train tracks, across intersections - that Shapiro finds his place, one that (re)centers the borders, edges, and margins to which so many are now pushed. Shapiro's spaces and relationships focus on everyday details, providing the familiar comforts of belonging. Often experimental yet always accessible, these poems plainly present tangible, specific moments of city life without erasing emotional or symbolic depth. Meaning, for Shapiro, lives on the streets, underfoot, as the body moves through crowded, even conflicted, passages. Within these contemporary concrete mazes, Shapiro explores issues of fragmenting cultures and lifestyles, immense economic inequity, perpetual digital interactions, and rapidly escalating environmental crisis. While his poems analyze and personify widespread cultural and personal anxieties, it is Shapiro's dense poetic architecture which, like a hive, hums with life. For Alex Wells Shapiro, "Buzzing means you are not alone."