WHAT TO MISS WHEN by Leigh Stein is available now!

Cover design and animation by Michael Salu (houseofthought.io)

On the heels of last summer’s hit novel Self Care, Leigh Stein’s long-awaited second poetry collection (and fifth book) is out now! What to Miss When is a 21st-century Decameron about pop culture, mortality, and the internet, written during the Coronavirus pandemic. You can order it here or from your favorite indie bookstore.

Leigh spoke about the book on NPR’s Morning Edition, and we’re doing an event tonight with Brooklyn Poets on what it was like to write and edit an entire poetry collection during the first six months of the pandemic.

Across social media, readers are describing What to Miss When as "a cathartic, playful, devious little read," what would happen if "Inside by Bo Burnham was an episode of Gossip Girl," and "a sometimes-chilling, sometimes-hilarious time capsule of a year that none of us saw coming... It feels like laughing with a friend after the end of the world."

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THIS TIME CAPSULE HOLDS:

Panic kept on you at all times like a passport

Boccaccio's Brigata and the Brat Pack

Malaise confessed in sexy baby voices

Perfume spritzed inside plague-doctor mask

Cringe as onomatopoeia

A mermaid gown of Clorox wipes

Juicy thoughtcrime thrown to a tiger

Post-it stating, Body positivity, ever heard of it?

The last Achilles of the twentieth century

Even the most virtuous with their breeches on their heads

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“I am so thankful for [Stein’s] brain—and these poems.” —Emily Burack, Alma 

“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

“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, 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 executive director of Brooklyn Poets

“Initially, you may think these poems are witty. They Are. Upon reflection, you may decide these poems are piercingly honest reflections of contemporary desires, run headlong into a plague year. They are. In the dark of a sleepless night, you may feel that these poems saw through your ironic façade and got at something deeper. They did.”—Keith Mosman, Powell's Books (Portland, OR)

Agents & Editors Recommend at Poets & Writers

Poets & Writers magazine kindly asked this editor what she recommends to writers, and gave me a little space to respond with abstractions and metaphors and this padded-shoulders rainbow prism photo. Thank you to books that feel like bridges, and writers who wave.

If you can identify elements of your writing as generous, my hunch is that your writing is communicating, not just expressing. To me, writing feels generous when something about it functions as a gift, whether that gift is “You are not the only one who feels this thing no one talks about” or “I am playing with form to help you better understand an experience that isn’t well served by other narrative structures.”

Click here to visit Poets & Writers for the full writeup. Many thanks to Spencer Quong for coordinating, and to Shira Erlichman for inspiration.

New poems at Dream Pop and Witch Craft Mag

FIVE poems from COSMIC TANTRUM, my I’m-still-tinkering-with-it full-length collection, are up now at Dream Pop Journal! Learning to let the writing be weirder and more fun, the way I think it has always wanted.

I cover the void with bones.
Some kind of person 

must feel a way about them.
Bones are not-void. Bones suggest 

beinghood. Had-once-been-hood.
I cover the void in Bésame lipstick

the good shit, in tiny gold tubes.
Could a void give you a name brand? 

Probably.

I also have two poems in Issue #7 of Witch Craft Mag, which can be ordered here.

I’m like, Really, you mean a terrifying vortex

of uncountable wings and eyes

moving at incomprehensible speed,

so stabbing-bright that you are sore afraid?

Thank you, Dream Pop and Witch Craft!

New poem at Trampset

Photo by Hans Eiskonen on Unsplash

I have a new poem up at Trampset, on regret, waiting, treating the body like a plant, and how the beginning of *last* year felt like an ill omen.

This is how the year begins, already wrong.
Was it in my stars that I would never think
of now, that I would wall myself inside
with looping thoughts?

The full poem is here, along with a lot of cool work, including two amazing fiction debuts in the same issue!

The LONG-AWAITED 2020 writing and editing roundup

Late to this party because time isn’t real. Before the infinite year finally ended, I did a little roundup on Twitter of everything I wrote and edited in 2020, sort of as proof? that things, small but meaningful things, still happen? and can help mark time? Like sand through an hourglass, tweets are (coarse and rough and irritating and…get everywhere?) ephemeral, so here’s the roundup again, where it’s likely to stay in one place for a while.

Essays, poems, etc. I wrote/published this year:

• “On ASMR, Anxiety, Relaxation in the Side-Hustle Economy, and Being Baby,” January 2020. My first Internet as Intimacy column, on the ASMR community and how, for someone who is anxious, receiving care across time/distance can be more relaxing than in-person care.

• “The Orchid’s Curse,” February 2020. This poem about Donna's monologue at Harry-the-orchid-guy was published in These Poems Are Not What They Seem (APEP Press, 2020), a Twin Peaks-themed collection edited by Kristin Garth and Justin Karcher. We had a virtual Performance Anxiety book launch.

• “Podcasts and Tarot Reading Showed Me How to Be Real Instead of 'Good,'” April 2020. My second column, on how podcasts and rituals helped me unbury my emotions and start to take up more space. I'd never been more afraid to share something I’d written; all of the comments and messages I received made me feel it was worth it. To everyone who reached out, even if I wasn’t able to respond: thank you.

• I wrote some dumb smut again for the revival of #shipwreckSF during a virtual “homewreck” event, April 2020. We wrecked Jane Austen’s Emma.

• “Of all the classes of people who ever lived” and “THE FINANCIAL BENEFITS OF CHIVALRY,” July 2020. My Phyllis Schlafly erasure poems in blood were published in Erase the Patriarchy (University of Hell Press, 2020), a beautiful, full-color anthology of art-as-poetry edited by Isobel O’Hare.

• “When the Internet Still Felt Like a Place, I Went There to Forget About My Body,” December 2020. My third (and maybe final?) Internet as Intimacy column, on the mortifying ordeal of having to exist in a physical form, and the powerful nostalgia I hold for the internet of the late 90s/early 2000s as I remember it. (Things I cut from this essay during its many drafts: secret sex codes in jelly bracelets, fear-mongering about teen texting acronyms, that time my face appeared in the Washington Post as an example of how well the Google Arts & Culture app works but no one noticed that I had dressed up as my doppelgänger as an illegibly “funny” prank...)

Essays and stories I edited for Catapult :

• “Prenatal Nightmares,” January 2020. This was the first essay for Maggie Tokuda-Hall’s Fear and Loathing in Utero column. “If I love you, then I’ve imagined your death a thousand times.”

• “It's a Boy! Whatever That Means,” March 2020. Maggie’s second column installment, on bad advice and gender nonsense.

• “AREA CANNIBALESS,” March 2020. Some visceral (I’m sure I’m not the first to make this joke) flash fiction by Lauren Friedlander. “I need for you to tell them about the boy, about what I’ve done. I need them to destroy me for it.” Mindblowing original art by Christina Chung.

• “Shlomo & Fanya,” April 2020. Short story by Angela Melamud, with several gorgeous illustrations by Gabriella Shery. “Blowing through fallen branches, cobwebs mask their faces. Their heels keep pace to a tempo the family knows by heart.”

• “The Gift of a Guilt-Free Epidural,” April 2020. Maggie’s final Fear and Loathing column. “Getting an epidural was an option that the instructor said could be necessary, and that we shouldn’t feel guilty taking. But she said this couched in a thousand reasons not to.”

• “Dying in America, or How to Become Completely Invisible,” May 2020. Essay by Bailey Cook Dailey, on navigating a lack of concrete etiquette for death and grief: “In this vacuum, the people in our lives and the people we encountered had reverted to what was easiest for them; denial, terror, avoidance.”

• “Montana Boys,” June 2020. Essay by Kamil Ahsan on navigating unspoken power dynamics in queer, interracial dating. “Suddenly, I felt comfortable saying out loud that he needed to reckon, really admit to himself, that what he was really saying was that he didn’t want to be with a brown person.”

• “Atrophy of the Author: In Fanfiction, Writers and Readers Are on More Equal Ground,” July 2020. Essay by Emilia Copeland Titus, on the world of fanfiction as a place to find community, hone craft, and reconsider the role of author. “The source text is almost superfluous, like a piece of art copied over and over until it is unrecognizable from the original.”

• “Living in Translation, or Why I Love Daffodils, an Unpopular Postcolonial Flower,” August 2020. Essay by Aruni Kashyap on reading and writing in multiple languages as a form of postcolonial resistance. “Underneath the sheen, it is a story that begins with epistemological violence; it is about the erasure of local languages and indigenous cultures.”

• “An Instrument of the Heart,” September 2020. Short Story by Nahida Nisa, on willfully ignoring trauma, and feeling/being alien. “She knew her mother’s planet must have been borne from the water and made entirely of it; she felt this is in her blood.”

• “An Ode to the Great Undead Novella,” October 2020. Essay by Aruni Kashyap on how “the death of the novella” is a U.S.-centric conversation. “Where I lived and grew up, the novella was never endangered. It was, in fact, a dominant genre that not only nourished our souls but also influenced public debates.”

Catapult and Soft Skull books:

I assisted series editor Yuka Igarashi with edits for Best Debut Short Stories 2020: The PEN America Dau Prize, published this fall (Catapult, 2020). This annual anthology features twelve prizewinning debut fiction writers; this past year’s winners were selected by judges Tracy O’Neill, Nafissa Thompson-Spires, and Deb Olin Unferth.

This year’s anthology features Ani Cooney, David Kelly Lawrence, Mohit Manohar, Valerie Hegarty, Kikuko Tsumura (translated by Polly Barton), Willa C. Richards, Kristen Sahaana Surya, Sena Moon, Damitri Martinez, Mbozi Haimbe, Matthew Jeffrey Vegari, and Shannon Sanders. Updates on winners present and past can be found at the Robert J. Dau Foundation website.

I acquired my first books for Soft Skull this year, which will roll out over the next long while: WHAT TO MISS WHEN, a new poetry collection by Leigh Stein (Fall 2021); HIGH-RISK HOMOSEXUAL, a debut memoir by Edgar Gomez (Fall 2021), and MONARCH, a debut novel by poet Candice Wuehle (Spring 2022).