2025: Poetry’s Year in Prose

In 2025, our features ranged widely and thought deeply—across forms, histories, places, and afterlives. We looked closely at Joe Brainard’s comics, the revolutionary surrealism of Jayne Cortez, the funny and profane brilliance of Essex Hemphill, and the often overlooked poems of Hannah Arendt. Other essays took poetry off the page and into unexpected sites: a swimming pool in Los Angeles, a haunted house in Nashville, a gaming table in Philadelphia. We explored the ins and outs of translation, and we paused to honor poets we lost this year, with beautiful tributes to Andrea Gibson, Alice Notley, Jerome Rothenberg, and others. Settle in: there's a lot to explore.

— The Editors

Features:
Criticism, profiles, and interviews

The World Is Yours. Here, Take It.
Joe Brainard's C Comics ran for only two issues, but it remains a testament to the absorbing pleasure of making art with your friends.
By Nicole Rudick

A Red Thread Toward the Monster
Lisa Olstein on archival sources, erasure, and mythology in Distinguished Office of Echoes.
By Alina Stefanescu

In Their Own Right: The Uncollected Animals Folio
Finding kinship with non-human beings.
By The Editors 

Like Fireflies Hanging from the Tamarind Tree
On Irma Pineda's trilingual Stolen Flower.
By Lily Meyer

Battered Heart
A new biography of Denis Johnson chronicles a life riven by "grace and incredible harm."
By Brian Patrick Eha

Dream in a Hailstorm of Riots
Jayne Cortez riffed on jazz, the blues, and R&B in poems whose "supersurrealism" sought to transform reality.
By David Grundy

A Punk-Rural Aesthetic
On Diane Seuss reading for birdseed.
By Beth Ann Fennelly

Don’t Call Me During the Day
Catching up with Richard Siken in Tucson.
By Raquel Gutiérrez  

Alive the Whole Time
Donika Kelly’s third collection revels in life on the other side of survival.
By Hannah Bonner

No One Will Ever Stop Our Songs
Jerome Rothenberg’s final anthology is his masterpiece: a centuries-spanning tribute to the complexity and contradictions of the American people, whatever illusory border separates them.
By Ed Simon

The Man Who Knew Trees
Stanley Plumly’s Collected Poems shows him to be the contemporary heir to John Keats.
By Andrè Naffis-Sahely 

Bodies on the Line
Two collections delve into the backbreaking world of factory labor in China.
By Rhian Sasseen 

A Charmed and Desperate Poet
On Alice Notley’s Disobedience.
By Joyelle McSweeney 

The Orbit of Our Dreaming
An elegy for Nikki Giovanni.
By Joshua Bennett 

All of This Is Magic Against Death
A magisterial new biography of Frank Stanford chronicles a poet obsessed with death and prone to betrayal.
By William Boyle

Life-Works: A Norma Cole Folio
A Canadian poet and painter who has been a linchpin of the Bay Area arts scene for nearly 50 years.
By Norma Cole and Dale M. Smith

Can You Tell Me What Life Is?
Laura Gilpin is best remembered as the author of “The Two-headed Calf.” Who was she, and why was her poetry career cut short?
By Maya C. Popa

The World Could Have Been Beautiful
Yannis Ritsos was one of the greatest Greek poets of the 20th century. A new translation reveals his powers didn't fade after a period of brutal incarceration.
By André Naffis-Sahely 

Cosmos Like Mine
Yuki Tanaka draws on the tradition of Japanese surrealism in Chronicle of Drifting.
By Ed Simon

Nothing to Fear From the Poet but the Truth
Ted Joans fused jazz and Surrealism in poems of revolutionary fervor.
By David Grundy

A Centaur Is Never Lonely
In Impossible Things, Miller Oberman's trans fatherhood is a loving rejoinder to the father who could not fully accept him.
By C.R. Grimmer 

The Ass-Splitting Truth
Essex Hemphill's funny, sad, profane, sexy poetry.
By James Hannaham 

Drink Me, Lick Me Even
Dario Bellezza scandalized Italy with unabashedly queer poetry about cruising and AIDS. Nearly thirty years after his death, a new translation brings his work into English.
By Daniel Felsenthal 

Heroines of Nothing at All
In The Rose, Ariana Reines offers an alternative to feminism’s well-worn obsession with women’s empowerment.
By Hannah Bonner

The Art Life
The first English-language translation of Tove Ditlevsen's poetry distills the intensity and mordant humor that make her one of Denmark's most revered exports.
By Joyelle McSweeney

The Deep, Dark, Seething Tar Pit of the Past
David Trinidad and Amy Gerstler in conversation.
By David Trinidad and Amy Gerstler

Born on a Day When God Was Ill
The Eternal Dice shows César Vallejo breaking with the Latin American modernist tradition in poems that mix satire, socialist ideals, and formal experimentation.
By Julia Kornberg

I’ll Write You a Good Letter
Joe Brainard's letters are playful, elusive, and hungry for art.
By Yasmine Shamma

Blood on the Cotton
New collections by Frank X. Walker and E. Hughes use documentary techniques to dramatize a tumultuous era in Black American history.
By André Naffis-Sahely

Walking the Fault Line
In Mojave Ghost, Forrest Gander recounts his 800-mile journey into the slow time of grief.
By Srikanth Reddy 

For the Love of the Word
Hannah Arendt was the rare philosopher who saw how limited her discipline could be. Poetry offered her another outlet for thinking.
By Daegan Miller

This Be the Place:
Short essays in which poets explore the mysteries and meaning of a particular place

This Be the Place: Door in the Mountain
Crouching, touching it with my fingertips, a sizzle of electric cold raced through my nervous system. It was, I realized, deadalive.
By Leath Tonino 

This Be the Place: A Gaming Table in Philadelphia
The table has been turned into places mundane and profound, bewitching and bedeviling.
By Ryan Teitman  

This Be the Place: A Wind at the Door
The house was perfect, even if it came with a ghost.
By Max McDonough  

This Be the Place: A Budget Pool in East LA
If you haven't begged for a kernel of time-earned wisdom while wet and half-naked, you haven’t lived.
By Diana Arterian 

This Be the Place: Making Everyone a Poet
It’s as though the bridge does the work of re-enchanting Fayetteville for me.
By Austiun Araujo 

This Be the Place: A Several-Acre Space of Tenderness
This pond is inside me: as summer, as stillness, as childhood—as peace.
By Han VanderHart  

This Be the Place: A Careening Wharf (for a Time)
You’d think that something called “careening” would be able to roll with whatever comes along.
By Lisa Fishman

This Be the Place: A 300-Year-Old Oak Tree
When I stop outside the fringes of the huge canopy, I let the tree know about my presence before making contact by closing my eyes and whispering words—hola, ¿puedo acercarme? hello, can I approach?
By Leonora Simonovis

This Be the Place: My Actual Huh
A tractor has as much right to be in a queer poem as a Fire Island reverie.
By Karl Knights

This Be the Place: A Countercultural Ritual in Japan
I closed my eyes and surrendered to the quiet—which was not as quiet as I thought.
By Michael Frazier

This Be the Place: A Poet’s Grave in Paris
What is the human meaning of a tombstone anyhow?
By Joshua Edwards

This Be the Place: Singing in Many Languages
I didn’t understand what kind of place Taizé was—but I understood I could stay there for very little money and would be fed three meals a day.
By Hannah Gamble

This Be the Place: The Hobbit Hole
I knew, with absolute certainty, that what I had experienced there was something I would never experience again.
By Steven Reigns 

This Be the Place: Not a Beginning, but a Following
I often get the impression of living between two courses or two times.
By Silvina López Medin  

This Be the Place: A Name Is a Thing That Fades
Sometimes the whole duration of place exists in memory all at once.
By Dan Beachy-Quick 

This Be the Place: I Shall Gaze
I think of the importance for the poet of finding a place in which to cultivate reverie, a state which I link to revelations.
By Bianca Stone

This Be the Place: A Blue Wall in Leadville
Suddenly I got why writers write all those books about the color blue, immersive as a dream.
By Mathias Svalina 

Poets on Translation:
Short essays in which poets examine the intersections of poetry and translation 

Poets on Translation: Huffing Like a Horse
Sometimes, choosing the “wrong” word can reveal what the “right” one can’t.
By Yuki Tanaka

Poets on Translation: Swimming in Two Rivers
Seeing a poem as a kernel in which a civilization is embedded.
By Wang Ping

Poets on Translation: Vemod or, Woe-mood
Considering how—rather than just what—a poem can mean.
By David Keplinger

Poets on Translation: A Strawberry-Flavored Sigh
Mother tongues and the chasms between languages.
By Cintia Santana

Poets on Translation: Mystery and Pluck
An imaginary conversation with Federico García Lorca.
By Cyrus Cassells 

Poets on Translation: Translating Titles, or The Thief Who Robbed Another Thief
Embracing ambiguity in names and naming.
By Layla Benitez-James 

Poets on Translation: Putting the Verse in the Fruit
Using new sounds to root a poem in a partially shared soil of linguistic meaning.
By Heather Green

Poets on Translation: Otherwise the Same
What gets lost in our eagerness to acknowledge that much gets lost in translation?
By Geoffrey Brock 

Poets on Translation: Attuned to the Echoes
On there being no such thing as a “correct” or “definitive” translation.
By Mira Rosenthal  

Poets on Translation: Relative Pitch
One could almost draw an analogy between relative pitch in music and a similar concept in translation, where context is everything.
By Nancy Naomi Carlson

Poets on Translation: The (Alter)native Speaker
Finding a way to stretch language to fit you and your stray prepositions.
By Mia You

Remembrances:
Tributes to poets who died in the past year

She Would Have Won a Street Fight: Remembering Mel Nichols
She was a winning combination of sassy humor and serious engagement.
By K. Silem Mohammad

A Wild and Precious Life: Remembering Andrea Gibson
Their love made no mistakes.
By Amber Tamblyn 

An Oracular Voice: Remembering Martha Silano
She tried to see the universe from an atom's point of view.
By Jeannine Hall Gailey 

“Always Being Myself”: Remembering Alice Notley
She survived in and because of poetry. That, and love.
By Nick Sturm

A Brain in Flames: Remembering Joshua Clover
Whether reciting poems from a bank lobby or singing along to Justin Bieber in LA traffic, he met the world with intellectual rigor and extraordinary attention.
By Sandra Simonds

A Voice Full of Breathturns: Remembering Pierre Joris
He was at home in French, in German, in English, in baseball, and in poetry.
By Robert Kelly and Charlotte Mandell 

You Should Be Called Beacon: Remembering Danielle Legros Georges
She sought to elevate unheard voices and expand the reach of art and of poetry.
By Jennifer Jean

Ang Tunay Na Lalaki (The Real Man): Remembering Nick Carbó
His cultural activism made him one of the greatest supporters of Filipino poets and a beloved mentor to many.
By Eileen R. Tabios 

Rapturously Audacious: Remembering Aziza Barnes
Anything, in their hands, could be shaped into art.
By José Olivarez and Jon Sands

On Going Home: Remembering Tyrone Williams
A poet of Detroit and Cincinnati with friends all over the country.
By Barbara Henning  

You Could Go Further: Remembering Breyten Breytenbach
A poet of risk, for whom writing and activism were one.
By David McLoghlin  

A Bridge Connecting Worlds: Remembering Jerome Rothenberg
He saw poetry as an ongoing shamanic journey, a ritual system unfolding across continents and time.
By Cecilia Vicuña 

We Are Blessed by the Dead: Remembering John Burnside
A poet who held imagination as his one most crucial tool in the search for a glimpse of glamourie.
By Robin Robertson

To Delight and Surprise: Remembering Jim Cory
A poet whose multifarious fascinations included ornithology, classical piano, jazz, long-distance rail travel, and architecture.
By Alina Pleskova