I am so happy to announce that little astronaut will finally be available!– and with lots of new poems. Thanks to Andrews McMeel Publishing little astronaut will be in bookstores September, 2022.

I have been so inspired over the years by notes people have written to me about little astronaut and parenthood, people who have started writing their own poems, sharing their poems and little astronaut artwork and tattoos. I’ve carried that with me as I’ve expanded the book and sought broader publication. So many of you have checked in with me to see when little astronaut will be available again, which really kept me going. As a thank-you for all the support, if you pre-order now, I will send you a special limited edition secret book from me called, Notes from the Crooked Nipple.

love,

jenny

available at: Indie Bound, Bookshop, Amazon, Barnes & Noble or your local bookstore…

Early Praise for little astronaut

“I loved Little Astronaut, a brilliant and searingly honest exploration of new motherhood and marriage amid new motherhood.”

—John Green, New York Times bestselling author of The Fault in Our Stars and Turtles All the Way Down

“J. Hope is one of my favorite poets.

little astronaut is a beautiful orchestration of the strange experience we call human. There is humor here and wisdom. This astronaut shows us how to find, among the most mundane details, a little bit of magic. In our era of so much destruction and disappointment, what luck to come across this bundle of laughter.” 

—Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic

“In little astronaut, J. Hope Stein writes a parental love so new to her, so overwhelming, that the poems read almost as if Stein were the first person to feel parental love at all. Rarely do such poems so thoroughly inhabit the moment. These poems convince me, effortlessly, that I am seeing the world new.”

—Shane McCrae, author of The Gilded Auction Block and Forgiveness Forgiveness

“The brave, electric, hilarious and indelibly true poems of little astronaut convey the utter shock that is, has always been, and will always be…parenthood.”

—Jean Hanff Korelitz, author of New York Times bestseller The Plot

“I want to buy little astronaut for every mother I know . . . No one talks about what comes next once you have the baby and what you go through and what’s expected of you, but J. Hope Stein does in this courageous collection.”

—Sharon Van Etten, singer song-writer

“Jen Hope Stein evokes Elizabeth Bishop, Philip Larkin, Nora Ephron but in a style so totally her own. I read this collection, choked-up, laughing, and in awe.”

—John Mulaney, Comic

“I think of her poem “The Now-Clock” 76 times a day”

– Ezra Klein (Host of  New York Time’s The Ezra Klein Show)

“A brilliantly wrought one-inch punch of a collection. Eclectic, funny and tender in a way that shows off Stein’s many, many gifts.”

—Alex Edelman,comic and creator of Just for Us

“little astronaut is such a vulnerable and important book. It really connects being a mother and a person with evolution and the way in which we are all animals but have higher aims…A vulnerable look, unafraid of being judged.” 

–Brian Koppelman, host of The Moment

A toast to the car seat on my bathroom floor in the New York Times 

Magic Trick and Body, I never knew I could love you read by me on NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross

FISH DR PLAY read by Stephen Colbert on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert

— “That’s a very high bar.” Stephen Colbert

last meal in the LA Times

Dancing, before you were born on Academy of American Poets

the foot in Ploughshares

Earth (In Reverse) on Ours Poetica (read by Mike Birbiglia)

we pay for sex in McSweeney’s  

We Typed Our Words (a poem-in-progress) read by me on Mike Birbiglia’s Working It Out Podcast with Matt Berninger and Carin Besser.

Kind of a theater nerd but, Ben Brantley quoted an infant reaches in his New York Times review of Mike Birbiglia’s The New One on Broadway

the little astronaut poem in Broadway production set of Mike Birbiglia’s The New One

That’s me laying on Mike Birbiglia in The New York Times

Introvert on instagram: I occasionally post things like this and this and this

The Ezra Klein Show

The Now-Clock and OONADAD read by Mike Birbiglia

______________________________________________________________________

“Mike Birbiglia and Jen Stein are the best collaborators since Emily Dickinson teamed up with her long-winded comedian friend. I’m joking because I cannot express how much this book affected me and how many times it made me cry.”―John Mulaney, comedian

“Mike Birbiglia & J. Hope Stein have written the seminal parenting tome–side-splittingly funny from the first word to the last delicious bite. It’s a page-turner, wise and wise-assed, the comic hit of the year. Whether you’ve been a parent or ever had one: you’ll love this knockout!”―Mary Karr, author of The Liars’ Club, Cherry, and Lit

“Life is not the same after having children. It’s delusional to pretend otherwise. But Mike Birbiglia and J. Hope Stein have not only survived, they’re making their most hilarious and truthful art yet. This book might save your best friend’s life.”―Lin-Manuel Miranda, Pulitzer Prize Winning writer of Hamilton

“This is a brilliant, funny, big-hearted version of he-said, she-said. Birbiglia and Stein trade jokes and poems and splendid storytelling about their roundabout stumble into parenthood. It’s hilarious, humane, often beautiful, and absolutely captivating.”―Susan Orlean, staff writer at The New Yorker and New York Times bestselling author of The Library Book

“The genius of this book is that Mike Birbiglia and J. Hope Stein have invented a totally new form. He tells incredibly funny stories. She gives a gorgeous, epic view of the same events, in poetry (she’s a published poet who’s been in The New Yorker). It’s about what they went through together, not wanting to have kids, and then having kids, through these two very different lenses. Their diabolical writing trick: sometimes she delivers the laughs and he delivers the feelings.”―Ira Glass, host of Public Radio’s This American Life

“In a ‘town where everyone is pretending to be happy and pretending to be in good marriage and pretending to be in a nice house’ it takes a poet and a comedian to tell us the truth. What is this truth? That we are lost, but trying to find ourselves, that we are awkward but long for grace, we are cruel but delight at the slightest drop of tenderness. This book is hilarious because it shows us a mirror that doesn’t lie. It sings because words give delight in each simplest moment. Imagine Groucho Marx and Jane Kenyon sit at the kitchen table and compose a book of days. When nothing else helps, it is a sense of humor and a beautiful song that will get us through.”―Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa

“I wish I had read The New One before having a kid. Mike confronts parenthood with the kind of devastating honesty that can’t help but be funny, and Jen’s poems capture what prose can’t. In a better world, this book would be sold with every pregnancy test in America.”―Bess Kalb, author of Nobody Will Tell You This But Me

“If The New One on Broadway is a raucous, tumbling tour through the many roomed house that is Mike and Jen’s journey into parenthood, then this book is a long, cozy weekend inside the home. Mike makes you coffee and settles in to tell his story at a wonderfully readable pace, bringing detail and nuance impossible to contain in the stage show. Jen’s poetry is the big stunner, an outrageous treasure casually presented, emeralds strewn amongst crumbs across the kitchen table, a string of pearls hanging on a doorknob.”―Jacqueline Novak, author of How to Weep in Public

 

J. Hope Stein is the author of Occasionally, I remove your brain through your nose (Poet Republik, 2017).

Her poems can be found in The New Yorker, Poetry International, Lenny Letter, In the Shape of a Human Body I Am Visiting the Earth: Poems from Far and Wide (McSweeney’s and Poetry International, 2017).

*****

“J. Hope Stein is one of my favorite poets …

Her images are outrageously vivid and memorable. Her music is alive, is unpredictable, is tender, is voracious. She updates the music of a great poet—say, John Berryman—into the 21st century, making the bard alive again, making the voice bristle with a verbal energy in this moment in time. But she is a poet all her own–unlike anyone else–writing a kind of music in which “the sky/drools sweetly to the ear” with sound that is full of emotion, full of erotic, ecstatic, essential moments: “I’m listening to Beethoven/…music swells/as it disappears into my pelvis.”

This is the kind of music that can take our most domestic moments–in which two people find themselves bewildered, and yet inseparable, in love–and see how they “act as two animals holding invisible balloons.” This music teaches us that our domestic joys, perhaps, are our last defense.

J. Hope Stein uses this defense of music, this shield of verbal art, against our moment’s ugliest creatures: “The steel men. The financiers. The patrons/of the petroleum arts,” and other kinds of trash, Donald Trump first in line among them. This poet knows that a time comes when only music and sensuality can still protect the soul. A time comes when there is no more time for the trivial. And she gives us the incredible energy, incredible verve of such saving music. Like I said, one of my favorite poets.”

❤ Ilya Kaminsky

 

“A perfect book of poems for the contemplative weirdo.”

❤ Lena Dunham

 

“J. Hope Stein’s poetry is inspired. Thick, playful, rewarding and true.”

❤ Pete Holmes

 

“ … perversely nourishing … ”

❤ Joe Pan, Brooklyn Arts Press

 

“… fresh, vital, surprising, and impactful … Occasionally, I Remove Your Brain Through Your Nose is a gem…

… a whirlwind of blazing insight lightly wrapped in deft and nimble language.

… You may feel after reading Occasionally, I Remove Your Brain Through Your Nose that Stein has performed just that feat upon you … a thorough wringing of the mind…”

❤ Cheyanne Gustason, New Pages 

 

“The book is brief, but the imagery and thought in it is so rich, it keeps expanding. Simultaneously, a giggle can build into a full-body laughing fit …

… [the book] ends in the middle of our thinking, our fruitless, round-and-round thinking, our not-learning-from-history-and-thus-repeating-it thinking, our wonderfully-inventive-yet-unable-to-save-ourselves-or-stop-ourselves thinking…. It’s a brilliant choice; it leaves the reader thinking and aware of her own responsibility in these matters. What should we do? What can we do? What will we do? Pondering it, I may pull my brain out through my nose.”

❤ Kathleen Kirk, Escape into Life

 

 

You can buy Occasionally, I remove your brain through your nose here at Poet Republik. (thanks! Maria Teutsch).

My poems are the luckiest poems that ever were to be bouncing around inside the cover artwork of (a thousand thank yous) Kate Micucci.  

Excerpts from Occasionally, I remove your brain through your nose are up at: Lenny Letter, Poetry International  and bloodroot.

 

*****

An excerpt from The Inventor is in the latest monster issue of Poetry International. Ilya Kaminsky and his team in San Diego have outdone themselves with a wholly holly alive collection of work from poets too sacred to name. (but here is the HOT cover which lists them). (also check out PI’s important and devastating reporting from Syria , Ukraine, and more, including their Poetry in a Time of Crisis issue.

 

 

*****

 

October 1 reading at KGB Bar with the brilliant !!! Jean Hanff Korelitz!!! 

(here’s a photo from a reading a few months ago at KGB Bar with my girl strapped to me. I don’t think she will let me do that any more.)