Snowy hair, oxbowed limbs, fretworked bone, the snout of a pen and fingerpainting paths of kikuyu … Come! Enjoy the verbal and visceral wonders of the poems I loved most during the first half of 2025.
‘Obit’ (from section III) by Victoria Chang
My children, children / today my hands are dreaming / as they touch your hair. / Your hair turns into winter. / When I die, your hair will snow.
Victoria Chang is the author of The Trees Witness Everything (Copper Canyon Press, 2022); the nonfiction book, Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief (Milkweed Editions, 2021); and Obit (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Poetry, and the PEN/Voelcker Award. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Chowdhury Prize in Literature. She is the Bourne Chair in Poetry at Georgia Tech and the Director of Poetry@Tech.
‘Door’ by Olumide Manuel
It reminds me of the one true love that shattered me / in the most comfortable penance—How we fell in / & out each other with unedged thorns, / doors absentia, wilding our bodies in full speed. / Arrows of clean delight, limbs oxbowed in floral wings.
Olumide Manuel is a poet, educator and an environmentalist. He is a 2x nominee for the Pushcart award, a Best of the Net nominee and the winner of the Ake Climate Change Poetry Prize 2022. His poems have been published in Up The Staircase Quarterly, Trampset, Gigantic Sequins, A Long House, Waccamaw Journal, Fiyah Magazine, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Frontier Poetry, Ake Journal, Reckoning Press, and elsewhere.
‘Someday I’ll Love—’ by Emerald ᏃᏈᏏ GoingSnake
like I dreamt of the lamb—slaughtered, / forgotten, / lying on porcelain tile, on crimson-filled grout— / and woke up thinking of my grandmother, / of her Betty Boop hands that held / marbled stone, held dough-balled flour, / held the first strands of my hair floating atop the river— /
Emerald ᏃᏈᏏ GoingSnake is an Indigenous poet from the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians and the Muscogee (Creek) Nation in Oklahoma. Winner of the 2024 Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award for poetry and the recipient of the 2023 Indigenous Nations Poets fellowship, they live in Santa Fe.
‘Love in a cold climate’ by Christine De Luca
the dream she planted / and the praise within her look / as she staked it, willing / the one rose to open, / to hold twilight.
Christine De Luca is a Scottish poet and novelist who was born and raised in Shetland. She writes in both English and Shaetlan (Shetlandic), the latter a form of Old Scots with much Norse influence. For the past five decades, De Luca has lived in Edinburgh, where in 2014 she was appointed the city’s fourth Makar – a Scottish honour akin to Poet Laureate. She is the author of eight poetry collections.
‘Juke’ by Diane Seuss
I was young. I looked like a Rubens / painting of a woman half-eaten / by moths. What lucky / debauchery, the ride back // on a washboard dirt road, / taking everything for granted, / flipping off the aurora borealis / like it was some three-toothed human / in flashy clothes dancing / to get my attention. / I wasn’t a mean drunk then, / just honest.
Diane Seuss was born in Indiana and raised in Michigan. Seuss is the author of the poetry collections Frank: Sonnets (2021), winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award; Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl (2018); Four-Legged Girl (2015), finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open (2010), winner of the 2009 Juniper Prize for Poetry; and It Blows You Hollow (1998).
‘How to Apologize’ by Ellen Bass
So you’ll need a boat. You could rent or buy, / but, for the sake of repairing the world, / build your own. Thin strips / of Western red cedar are perfect, / but don’t cut a tree. There’ll be / a demolished barn or downed trunk / if you venture further. / And someone will have a mill. / And someone will loan you tools. / The perfume of sawdust and the curls / that fall from your plane / will sweeten the hours.
Ellen Bass was born in Philadelphia in 1947 and grew up in New Jersey. She received a BA from Goucher College and an MA in creative writing from Boston University, where she studied with Anne Sexton. She is the author of nine poetry collections, the most recent of which is Indigo (Copper Canyon Press, 2020).
‘The Language of Bleak Averages’ by Anthony Lawrence
then a plate of fretworked bone, lifted clear to expose / the source of my father’s unbalanced body and moods – // a tumour, like the dark, cystic head of a swamp flower / grafted to a host of nerveless coils.
Anthony Lawrence is an important figure in contemporary Australian poetry. He has received numerous grants, awards and prizes, is widely read and anthologised, with 12 collections of poetry. Besides poetry he has written a novel, In the Half Light (Picador, 2000). Fishing, the coast and the ocean are recurrent subjects in Lawrence’s work, as is death and poets.
‘Plague’s Monologue’ by Lynn Emanuel
And the last few words huddled together, like bees in a hive buzzing and plotting? I cut their throats with the scythe of a comma, turned the snout of my pen against them.
Lynn Emanuel is the author of five books of poetry. Her most recent book, The Nerve of It: Poems New and Selected, was awarded the Lenore Marshall Award by The Academy of American Poets.
‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers’ by Langston Hughes
I’ve known rivers: / Ancient, dusky rivers. // My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
Langston Hughes was a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance, the flowering of black intellectual, literary, and artistic life that took place in the 1920s in a number of American cities, particularly Harlem. A major poet, Hughes also wrote novels, short stories, essays, and plays. He sought to honestly portray the joys and hardships of working-class black lives, avoiding both sentimental idealization and negative stereotypes.
‘Evening Traffic’ by Bret Shepard
Lost // on the trails of others, lost in reflection / most nights – memories like the melt that was once ice. What is // lost outside moves without you.
Bret Shepard is from Alaska. He is author of the collection Absent Here, which was awarded AWP’s 2023 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and published as part of the Pitt Poetry Series. Another collection, Place Where Presence Was, won the Moon City Poetry Prize. Bret’s chapbook The Territorial received the Midwest Chapbook Prize from the Laurel Review and GreenTower Press; and Negative Compass was awarded the Wells College Chapbook Prize.
‘Recreation’ by Audre Lorde
moving through our word countries / my body / writes into your flesh / the poem / you make of me. // Touching you I catch midnight
Audre Lorde was an American writer, professor, philosopher, intersectional feminist, poet and civil rights activist. Lorde wrote eighteen books of essays and poetry, for which she won numerous awards, including the American Book Award for A Burst of Light. ‘Recreation’ is from The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde.
‘Febrile’ by William Fox (Judith Wright Poetry Prize – Runner up)
Later, it was hypothesised / my little sister had been lying in / the sun too long. There was / a local cricket game on, / and she was lying stomach-down / fingerpainting paths of kikuyu / out near the boundary line.
William Fox is from Naarm / Melbourne. His work has appeared in most major Australian literary journals. He holds a PhD in Australian Literary Studies from Melbourne University and works in law. His debut collection, Apollo Bay, was released by Rabbit in 2023. ‘Febrile’ was runner up in the Judith Wright Poetry Prize.
‘Daughters’ by Phoebe Stuckes
Let us want none of what anchored our mothers / Let us never evolve to be good or beautiful / Let us spit and snarl and rattle the hatches / Let us never be conquered /Let us no longer keep keys in our knuckles
Phoebe Stuckes is a writer from West Somerset. She has been a winner of the Foyle Young Poets award four times and is a former Barbican Young Poet. She has performed at the Southbank Centre, Waterstones Trafalgar Square, Wenlock Poetry Festival and was the Ledbury Festival young poet in residence in 2015. She has also read her work on BBC Radio 3. Her writing has appeared in The Rialto, The North, The Morning Star, Ash and Ambit. Her debut pamphlet, Gin & Tonic is available from Smith|Doorstop books and was shortlisted for The Michael Marks Award 2017. Her first full-length collection, Platinum Blonde, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2020.
‘Daphne’ by Ellora Sutton
I could not run / so I took root, still as a housewife, / stagnant. // My eyelids went first. / Desiccated to tracing paper / to sandpaper. / You, in your gleaming arrogance, you could never foresee this
Ellora Sutton is an MA student from Hampshire. She has won many awards, including the Mslexia Poetry Competition, the Artlyst Art to Poetry Award, and the Pre-Raphaelite Society Poetry Competition.
Now, the rain, the iron rain, with its little keys / is closing all the doors . . . // and I think we’re all dead. See how the sky / sits like a tombstone on the roofs.
Bert Meyers was a self-taught lyric poet, picture framer, gilder, teacher, and rebel. He was born in Los Angeles in 1928 and died in 1979. Six books of his poetry were published in his lifetime and three posthumously. The most recent book is Bert Meyers: On the Life and Work of an American Master published by Pleiades Press. The website bertmeyers.com has more information on him with a selection of his poetry, essays about him, audio recordings, videos and more.
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