For the past couple of years, I’ve gotten lazy about doing any kind of year-in-review post, despite having read some truly remarkable books, especially in translation. I took the attitude that no one really cares what I’ read’ve been reading but me—which might well be true, but ignores the fact that blogging is how I keep track of things for my own purposes, as well. This was brought home to me a couple of weeks ago when I nearly ordered a friend’s book for the second time, forgetting that I had bought and read it just six months earlier… and that it had been absolutely marvellous! I’m talking about Sarah Sloat’s Classic Crimes.
So in order to avoid any further such forgetting, I have combed my emails for tracking notifications, gone through my order history of second-hand books at eBay and Amazon, and attempted to locate all the other collections I’ve picked up hither and yon. I now have a vast pile on the sofa next to me, and am re-reading books I liked on the first read to see what I think of them now. I cannot recommend this enough as a year-end activity. I’m having so much fun!
I very much doubt I’ll be able to pick a single favorite, since they are all so different, and it hardly seems fair to put, for example, a young author’s first collection in competition with a seasoned poet’s collected works. But let me start with a few examples of the latter.
Following my re-read of Neruda’s Residencia en Tierra in late 2024, I wanted to revisit a few other Great Poets. I’d left my copy of Lorine Niedecker’s Collected Works (edited by Jenny Penberthy, University of California Press, 2002) in the UK, and initially I couldn’t find an affordable copy on eBay, so I picked up the earlier selected, The Granite Pail, which is the one edited by her literary executor Cid Corman for Gnomon Press in 1985, and I thought he did a brilliant job—so much so that, as soon as I finished it, I took another look and found a copy of the Collected Works in hardcover, mint condition, for far less than any of the paperback copies, so I ordered and devoured that too. More and more, Lorine Niedecker is the poet I most want to be when I grow up.
Idly going though City Lights’ online catalog one day, I noticed a translation of the 20th-century Spanish poet Jorge Guillén, Horses in the Air and other poems, in a bilingual edition translated by Cola Franzen way back in 1987. The other two translations of Guillén in my library are devoted entirely to poems from his magnum opus Cántico, but this later volume focuses on his later works, especially Cántico‘s companion work, Clamor. One can never have enough Guillén, and Franzen’s translations are spot-on most of the time, I thought.
Michael Longley’s Collected Poems (Jonathan Cape, 2006) was catch-up reading of an essential English-language minimalist and war poet, after first being extremely impressed by his 2011 collection A Hundred Doors (also from Cape, or Wake Forest University Press in North America). I’m not sure how well known he is stateside; he never developed anything like Heaney’s reputation, I gather. I’m afraid I was only prompted to read him by the memorial posts on British and Irish poetry blogs following his death in January.
I tend to prefer single-author collections to anthologies or journals, but I did really enjoy my contributor’s copy of Keystone Poetry: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania, edited by Marjorie Maddox and Jerry Wemple (Penn State University Press, 2025). It’s an excellent introduction to the state, organized geographically, and does include a fair number of poets from outside academia and from working-class backgrounds. It does such a great job of representing how residents feel about the places where they live and work, or where their people are from. Every state should have an anthology like this!
Haiku 21.2, edited by Lee Gurga and Scott Metz (Modern Haiku Press, 2025) is a follow-up to Haiku 21 (from the same editors), for my money the most important English-language haiku (ELH) anthology of the 21st century. Like its predecessor, Haiku 21.2 devotes plenty of space to experimental and avant-garde haiku, but includes more traditional ones as well, so might be even more useful as a snapshot of where ELH has been going in recent years, and what else it might be capable of.
I can see that if I continue this post in a discursive vein, I won’t finish by the end of the year, so let me speed things up a little and transition to a list. I’m afraid I’m gonna be extra boring and put it in alphabetical order by author’s last name.
Garous Abdolmalekian, Lean Against This Late Hour, translated from the Persian by Ahmad Nadalizadeh and Idra Novey (Penguin, 2020)
Gillian Allnut, Lode (Bloodaxe, 2025)
Jean d’Amérique, Workshop of Silence, translated from the French by Conor Bracken (Vanderbilt Univerity Press, 2020)
Beau Beausoleil, War News II: 12/9/2023 to 6/3/2024 (fmsbw, 2025)
See also the first volume, published online in December 2023 by Agitate! journal: War News
Sean Thomas Dougherty, Death Prefers the Minor Keys (BOA Editions, 2023)
Charlotte Eichler, Swimming Between Islands (Carcanet, 2023)
Christian Lehnert, Wickerwork, translated from the German by Richard Sieburth (Archipelago Books, 2025)
Eve Luckring, Signal to Noise (Ornithopter Press, 2025)
Marc McKee, Consolationeer (Black Lawrence, 2017)
rob mclennan, the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press, 2025)
paul m., magnolia diary (Modern Haiku Press, 2024)
Billy Mills, a book of sounds (Shearsman, 2024)
Wendy Pratt, Blackbird Singing at Dusk (Nine Arches Press, 2024)
Martha Silano, Terminal Surreal (Acre Books, 2025)
Sarah J. Sloat, Classic Crimes (Sarabande Books, 2025)
Robert van Vliet, Vessels (Unsolicited Press, 2024)
Donna Vorreyer, Unrivered (Sundress Publications, 2025)
These were the poetry books that really blew me away in 2025. Most were either recommendations on blogs or impulse purchases after reading a selection online. Poetry Daily has been really useful for finding out about good poetry in translation, and the Charlotte Eichler book was from them as well. I also learn about new books by signing up for emails from small presses I like.
Currently I’m only subscribed to three print journals: Modern Haiku, Frogpond, and Rattle, plus I always buy the print anthology of a year’s worth of The Heron’s Nest. There are a welter of other online magazines I struggle and mostly fail to keep up with. As I age, I find I prefer reading print to screens by a long shot.
Which, yes, may have implications for how I share my own work with the world at some point. I suppose this is where I should mention that my most impactful and chin-scratchy nonfiction read of the year was Yanis Varoufakis’ Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, which painted the condition of us cloud serfs in pretty stark terms.
Cross-posted to Substack.
