What to Miss When

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. (Aug.)