What to Miss When
Poems
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Poems about pop culture, mortality, and the internet, written during the Coronavirus pandemic—for readers who are more likely to double-tap Instapoems than put their phone down long enough to read The Decameron.
Catalyzed by sheltering in place and by a personal challenge to give up alcohol for thirty days, Leigh Stein, the poet laureate of The Bachelor, has written a twenty-first-century Decameron to frame modern fables. What to Miss When makes mischief of reality TV and wellness influencers, juicy thoughtcrimes and love languages, and the mixed messages of contemporary feminism.
“Think Starlight,” the first poem in this collection, written before any self-quarantine orders, imagined the likelihood that the United States would follow in Italy’s footsteps in terms of caseload and hospital overwhelm. By March 17, 2020, the imagined was the real: New York City had closed schools, bars, and restaurants—with the rest of the country close behind.
With nihilist humor and controlled despair, What to Miss When explores fears of death and grocery shopping, stress cleaning and drinking, celebrities behaving badly, everything we took for granted, and life mediated by screens—with dissociation-via-internet, and looking for mirrors in a fourteenth-century pandemic text, a kind of survival response to living casually through catastrophe.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this occasionally humorous second collection, Stein (Dispatch from the Future) reflects on her time in lockdown during the Covid-19 pandemic. The collection draws loosely from The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio, written when the plague hit Italy in the 14th century. Her modern take finds the Florentine characters planning to ride out the pandemic "playing queen and bingeing prestige TV," then noting, for some reason, that "when you put women together in a dormitory or, say, an online yarn community, they tend to destroy one another psychologically." Decameron is an intriguing parallel, but unfortunately, Stein's use of it doesn't amount to more than a few quips. Comparing herself to Anne Frank, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson, Stein seems intent on provoking the reader to the point of exasperation, which is unfortunate, as her experimentation with disastrous skin-care regimens and musing on the corporate appropriation of protest movements ("Dior's Defund the Po-po") might otherwise be funny. When Stein sets aside the persona of the online millennial to express something real—as in the solemn, grief-stricken poem "Memorial Day": "Readers of the future, my apologies, / we were incapable of holding the whole catastrophe / in our heads"—the poems feel more developed. There's a lot of unrealized potential here.
