Episode 257: Faux POC Poetry (with Leigh Stein)
Blocked and Reported
Katie Herzog and Jesse Singal
4.6 • 4.1K Ratings
🗓️ 21 April 2025
⏱️ 74 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week on Blocked and Reported, Katie is joined by writer Leigh Stein to discuss her new book, the personal essay boom and bust, the ethics of deletion, "The Vanishing White Male Writer,” and a race-based hoax in the poetry world.
If You're Seeing This, It's Meant for You by Leigh Stein (Penguin Random House)
The Diana Tarot : Handmade Products
Control, Alt, Delete (Splicetoday.com)
Call Me the 21st-Century Ern Malley (How I Fooled the Poetry World)
Echolalia Review: An Anti-Poetry Collection
The Best American Poetry Controversy (The Best American Poetry Blog)
The Vanishing White Male Writer (Compact Magazine)
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Black and Reported. I'm Katie Herzog and joining me today while Jesse is launching single-handed, his Made in America Flashlight Company. We have Lee Stein. |
| 0:18.0 | Lee is a poet, a novelist, a memoirist. She has published six soon to be seven books, |
| 0:23.7 | including the wonderful self-care, a satire about girl boss culture and the wellness industrial |
| 0:29.2 | complex. This is truly a blocked and reported favorite. Lee, welcome back. Thank you for having me back. |
| 0:34.3 | I'm so glad to have you here. This is your second appearance on the show, and you are |
| 0:38.2 | really the perfect person to have on today, because in the second half of the show, we're going to |
| 0:42.0 | be discussing a hoax in the poetry world. I need a poet for that one, and I'm so pleased that you |
| 0:46.7 | took time out of your schedule to lend us your expertise. But before we get to that, Lee, you have a new book coming out in August. Tell me about it. So I have a new book that is a gothic suspense and part satire that's set in a D-list TikTok hype house. |
| 1:03.8 | If you don't know what a hype house is, it's like an influencer mansion where everyone creates content together. |
| 1:09.0 | And in my book, a 39-year-old woman who has kind of aged out of the media industry and cannot find work |
| 1:14.8 | accepts a job managing these Gen V content creators. |
| 1:19.8 | And one of them is a tarot card TikTok creator who has gone missing. |
| 1:24.1 | Oh, a mystery. |
| 1:25.1 | It's a mystery. |
| 1:26.4 | And I have a cute story for bar pod listeners, |
| 1:29.6 | which is that I was at the Christmas party in New York City, and I met an artist who's also |
| 1:34.2 | a bar pod listener named Jennifer May Rylund. And I was like, I know you because you did this |
| 1:39.2 | Princess Diana tarot card deck where each card in the deck is like a different scene from Princess Diana's |
| 1:45.3 | life. Oh, my God. And I was like, can I hire you to paint tarot cards from my fictional novel? |
| 1:52.4 | And she was like, yes. And so we've been collaborating on this project now where she's painting |
| 1:56.8 | scenes from my novel as tarot cards. And we're going to produce stickers out of them. So my |
| 2:02.4 | special offer today to Bar-Pod listeners is if you pre-order my novel, which is called, |
... |
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