Description

Soft Skull, paperback

Publication Date: August 10, 2021

Publisher Marketing:Poems about pop culture, mortality, and the internet, written during the Coronavirus pandemicfor readers who are more likely to double-tap Instapoems than put their phone down long enough to readThe Decameron.

Catalyzed by sheltering in place and by a personal challenge to give up alcohol for thirty days, Leigh Stein, the poet laureate ofThe Bachelor, has written a twenty-first-centuryDecameronto frame modern fables.What to Miss Whenmakes 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 Italys footsteps in terms of caseload and hospital overwhelm. By March 17, 2020, the imagined was thereal: New York City had closed schools, bars, and restaurantswith the rest of the country close behind.

With nihilist humor and controlled despair,What to Miss Whenexplores fears of death and grocery shopping, stress cleaning and drinking, celebrities behaving badly, everything we took for granted, and life mediated by screenswith dissociation-via-internet, and looking for mirrors in a fourteenth-century pandemic text, a kind of survival response to living casually through catastrophe.