What to Miss When

June 21, 2021
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.

September 1, 2021

In this collection, the Amy Award-winning Stein (Dispatch from the Future) frames her daily life around the COVID-19 pandemic with numerous references to The Decameron and The Diary of Anne Frank. Stein's narrative loosely and lightly describes how she is sheltered with her husband in a house in the suburbs and reads novels, dyes her hair, and exfoliates her skin. She shops in a grocery store, where she hears a King George-like voice announcing the one-way aisles, and peruses the lists of the dead in the New York Times. She notes that while she is affected by the loneliness, lockdowns, and isolation of this plague year, she isn't personally afflicted by it. Writing from a darkly humorous perspective. she uses copious examples of paradox, irony, and non sequiturs and continually drops phrases from poetry by W.B. Yeats, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Mary Oliver, Sylvia Plath, and others. Even Jane Austen has her say, as one of the poems begins with "It is a truth universally acknowledged...." Although the allusions are distracting at times, they also add a pleasantly sarcastic tone to a subject that could weigh morosely on the reader, especially now, since the pandemic is not yet finished. VERDICT The power in this collection lies in the way Stein serves her feelings on ice. Although she never mentions T.S. Eliot, her writing style is influenced by his notion that poetry is not a turning loose of emotion but an escape from it.--C. Diane Scharper, Johns Hopkins Univ., Baltimore

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