Review
"I am so thankful for [Stein's] brain—and these poems." —Emily Burack, Alma
"Satire and humor are some of the hardest things to pull off in poetry and Stein does it wonderfully in her new book What to Miss When. These reflect our current selves, in all their online messiness and glory." —Gabriel Dozal, BOMB
"In her dazzling new collection, Leigh Stein has managed to create art from the mess of modern life, with poems both elegiac and flippant in equal measure . . . She manages to imbue each poem with just enough levity to keep the reader from losing hope. I cannot recommend this collection highly enough." —The Voracious Bibliophile
"Darkly humorous . . . Pleasantly sarcastic . . . The power in this collection lies in the way Stein serves her feelings on ice." —Library Journal
“Smart, honest, vulnerable, and really, really beautiful. It feels like the book for this exact moment.” —Lynn Melnick, author of Landscape with Sex and Violence
“What To Miss When is hilarious and absolutely horrifying. If you think the quarantine habits you developed are unique and charming, read this book to be put in your place. But I beg of you, gift that to yourself, it'll make you feel less alone. ‘I'm a feminist, I got the memo,’ is Stein's perfect disclaimer when shouting the things so many of us are afraid to even whisper. It's a specific kind of book that helps us remember how things were, that serves as a map for our children to understand why we are the way we are. This book is one of them.” —Olivia Gatwood, author of Life of the Party
"Early on in Leigh Stein’s What to Miss When, the speaker says she 'must be some basic bitch to click / ‘Decameron and Chill?’ in Town and Country,' and we know we’re in for a ride through the pandemic that has some mischief in it. It’s this mischief, Stein’s relentlessly refreshing humor about the 'new normal'—equal parts rueful self-deprecation and excoriating cultural critique—that makes this book such a worthy artifact of the American experience of the pandemic." —Jason Koo, founder and director of Brooklyn Poets
“I'm obsessed with this poetry collection. It seems effortless, but it's doing so much. This is the lyric as it was intended to be used: vital, urgent, pithy, granular, but at the same time, macro, historic, steeped in literary tradition but always subtly subversive.” —Dr. Adam James Smith, Senior Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century English Literature, York St John University
“A strikingly effective melee of the literary and the very relatable, which is a really difficult balance to nail in trying to represent the pandemic in literary form. Remarkable, skillful, and wonderful.” —Dr. Jo Waugh, Senior Lecturer, English Literature, York St John University
About the Author
Leigh Stein is the author of five books including the novel Self Care and the poetry collection Dispatch from the Future. She has also written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Allure, ELLE, The Cut, Salon, and Slate. She is a recipient of an Amy Award from Poets & Writers and The Cut named her "poet laureate of The Bachelor."
