Best Recent Poetry (2025)

Inspired by the nineteenth century image of an enslaved woman wearing iron horns and bells, Alison C. Rollins's Black Bell continues an exploration of cataloging individual experience and collective memory. As Rollins sets out to resuscitate and embody the archive, we see a chorus of historical figures like Eliza Harris, Henry "Box" Brown, and Lear Green; readers can listen in as Phillis Wheatley takes a Turing test or venture through Dante's Inferno...

"Call this mutiny is the seventh book from award-winning and internationally-renowned Pacific Islander author Craig Santos Perez. These poems were originally published in journals and anthologies between 2008-2023, but this is the first time they have been collected into a single volume. Throughout, Perez continues his critical exploration of native cultures, decolonial politics, colonial histories, and the entangled ecologies of his homeland of Guam,...

"There are fevers you still wish to forget," writes Eduardo Martínez-Leyva, but how fortunate for the rest of us that he remembers. These tenderly crafted autobiographical poems pierce through to the heart of pain, love, loss, and the ongoing search for salvation-or at least a salve. Housed in the lived experiences of a queer Latinx person born and raised in the border town of El Paso, Cowboy Park seamlessly blends themes of masculinity, identity,...

Set in locations from dive bars to Montparnasse Cemetery, from an ancient Greek temple to a tourist shop in Assisi, Exit Opera explores the ever-vexing issues of time, mortality, love, and loss, and considers the roles of art and human connection. Whatever their nominal subject-jazz, zombies, Buddhism, Siberian tigers-these poems make for a compelling mix of humor and pain, difficulty and solace. In a nod to Keats, one of the many fellow travelers...

"Foxglovewise is, at its core, a response to the singular experience of the loss of one's parents. It begins at an Eastern Orthodox Epiphany ritual in Florida and ends in a cemetery in Los Angeles. Yet, as with Ange Mlinko's other books of poetry, the collection uses geography as a trope for the ways in which we try to map out our lives and make them legible, even as poetry, music, and paintings suggest that much of what happens, or matters, to us...

Part myth retelling, part character study, this debut poetry collection reimagines the mythic beauty from Homer's "Iliad" as a disgruntled housewife in 1990s Tennessee. Zoccola explores Helen's isolation and rebellion as her expansive personality clashes with the social rigidity of a small town: she marries the wrong man, gives birth to a child she is not ready to parent, and begins an affair that throws her life into chaos, but she never surrenders...

"Nationally acclaimed and multi-award-winning poet, Ostriker, brings The Holy & Broken Bliss to light after the pandemic--these keenly observant and urgent poems feel grounded in daily life, the rituals of living, and their tendernesses. Despite our deep flaws and imperfections, there can still be cause for joy, and there is always a reason for celebration. Poems find strength in marriage, appreciating an unbreakable bond in the middle of the world...

"In If Nothing, the speaker confronts addiction, the learned behaviors and expectations of masculinity, fatherhood, and the feelings of guilt and shame, attempting to understand them better and in doing so, find redemption and forgiveness. The poems often call us to listen to ourselves closer and ask, how do we forgive ourselves? This is a book that wants readers to feel their feelings without shame or remorse. The tension between the physical and...

"In these last prayerful poems by Jean Valentine, the poet visits loss, death, and transitional states. Full of longing, connections, and intergenerational knowledge, Valentine continues the mystical journey that has carried her through a lifetime devoted to poetry. Spirits connect. Guides are everywhere as she is "leaving all worlds behind." Love doesn't disappear but is steadfast and without boundaries. A poet of deep tenderness for everything living,...

"Mojave Ghost initiates an unusually tender bond with the reader as it chronicles an intimate relationship with arresting honesty and vividness. Moving through grief and loss towards a renewal that never sidesteps the wholeness of experience, Gander's new collection discovers an articulate language for the merging of exterior and interior landscapes. Gander, trained as a geologist, walked along much of the 800-mile San Andreas Fault toward the desolate...