On first blush, our most-read poems of 2025 don’t have much in common. Some are grief-stricken, others full of jokes; some consist of short-lined verse, others of dense prose. Off-kilter monologues by Emily Skillings and Alyssa Moore adopt the voices of fictional characters, while elegiac poems from Victoria Chang and John Jeremiah Sullivan seem to speak in propria persona. Subjects range from loss and revolution (Camille Rankine, aracelis girmay) to candy brands and Little Women (Tommy Pico, Kathleen Ossip). The themes and modes represented here are as various as the poets themselves.
Yet when these poems are read as a group, a subtle commonality begins to emerge: They all nod to the absurdity of our present moment. This note of strangeness reflects a year of news cycles as enraging as they were ridiculous, when, in the words of Canisia Lubrin, “our laughter drained into a stormed volt.” These poems transport us—not to other worlds, exactly, but to the oddest, most unsettling corners of our own. “Our trials continue with inexhaustible fire as we reckon the damage,” writes Harryette Mullen in the title poem from her latest collection. The fire is formidable, these poems aver, but so is the artwork forged inside it.
—the editors