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2025 has been a year of contradictions: hyperconnectivity and loneliness, political theater and private reckoning, a collective desire to scream without forgetting how to whisper. Each collection on this year’s list speaks to that tension.
In Taylor Byas’s Resting Bitch Face, anger threads through joy and poems continually return to the charged moment when honesty becomes a superpower. The poems in Blue Opening by Chet’la Sebree are about being and beginnings: chronic illness and motherhood, where we all came from, where we might go. Tiana Clark’s Scorched Earth tackles heat in all its prickly forms—political, personal, or atmospheric—and examines what happens after something essential goes up in flames. Helen of Troy, 1993, Maria Zoccola’s debut, reimagines The Iliad‘s heroine as a 90’s Tennessee housewife to brilliant and hilarious effect. And Cathy Linh Che’s Becoming Ghost gives us infinite, global layers of context to what might first seem like a simple family drama.
In a moment when everything is compressed, accelerated, or fed through an algorithm, these poets insist on depth. The insistence on messy humanity feels like resistance. These books remind us that where we place our attention is still a personal choice, and that language can slow the world’s turning long enough for meaning to appear.
– Kelly Luce
Editor, The Commuter
TOP 5 POETRY COLLECTIONS OF THE YEAR:
Resting Bitch Face by Taylor Byas
Taylor Byas’s sophomore collection interrogates the relationship between Black feminine bodies and artistic creation across media that range from the classical to the pop cultural. In sections named for stages of the painting process, Byas considers the violence of male artists capturing muses in ways those muses may not have consented to, and the power of Black women artists to turn their own critical gazes back on that history.
Blue Opening by Chet’la Sebree
In Blue Opening, experiences associated with Black womanhood and motherhood inform discussions of origins, beginnings, and creation. Throughout the poems, Sebree attempts to get to know the unknowable by looking at her past, peering into the universe, and shaping and re-shaping language. Readers will be enthralled by the array of forms and modes of communication utilized in this collection.
Becoming Ghost by Cathy Linh Che
In her sophomore collection, Cathy Linh Che recenters Vietnamese experiences in the story of her parents, who fled the Vietnam War as refugees only to be cast as extras in Francis Ford Coppola’s film about the conflict, Apocalypse Now. As contributors to the film, they were denied both dialogue and credit. Writing in her own voice and those of her parents, Che also grapples with the pain of telling family stories after being disowned by her father.
Scorched Earth by Tiana Clark
A collection that rises from the ruins of divorce, Scorched Earth brims with deeply intimate and romantic poems that explore themes relating to Black womanhood, sensuality, and queerness. Clark’s meditations on possibility and hope ring clear and true throughout this stunning, intricate collection.
Helen of Troy, 1993: Poems by Maria Zoccola
Maria Zoccola’s debut collection reimagines the Homeric Helen of Troy as a larger-than-life housewife struggling against the strictures of small-town life in early-nineties Sparta, Tennessee. She marries a man she calls “the Big Cheese,” has a daughter she isn’t ready to parent, and embarks on a chaotic affair, giving the chorus of Spartan women who voice some of the book’s poems plenty to gossip about. Two poems in the collection, “helen of troy makes peace with the kudzu” and “helen of troy feuds with the neighborhood,” were originally published in The Commuter.
Electric Lit’s Additional Favorite Poetry Collections:
Disintegration Made Plain and Easy by Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi
Disintegration Made Plain and Easy, the funny and surreal debut collection of frequent Electric Literature contributor Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi, explores themes of nudity and death because, as the poet puts it, “Death is the soul getting naked.” A series of “about the author” poems allows the author’s humor and identity to shine throughout.
The Intentions of Thunder by Patricia Smith
Winner of the National Book Award for Poetry, this collection of career-spanning poems is a striking addition to Patricia Smith’s oeuvre. The collection embraces the many possibilities of poetry, amplifying neglected voices through rich storytelling and boundless language. Oscillating perspectives on beauty, race, conflict, death, belief, and deceit turn these poems into reservoirs of knowledge and insight. After experiencing The Intentions of Thunder, it will become clear to readers why Danez Smith refers to Patricia Smith as the “greatest living poet.”
I Do Know Some Things by Richard Siken
I Do Know Some Things, a National Book Award Finalist, is Richard Siken’s searing collection of 77 prose poems written in the aftermath of his stroke. Abandoning traditional line breaks, Siken lets the text unfurl in dense prose blocks that mirror the fractured cognition and halted speech of his recovery. The result is a raw, autobiographical reckoning with childhood trauma, loss, and the fragility of the body, delivered in a stark and unornamented voice.
Night Watch by Kevin Young
Night Watch by Kevin Young is a deeply elegiac collection that explores personal grief, collective memory, and American history. Its four sections move through meditations on the moon and birds, Young’s Louisiana roots, the story of the enslaved conjoined twin singers Millie-Christine, and a Dante-inspired descent into the underworld. Through rich, musical lines, Young blends lyricism and existential inquiry into a powerful meditation on loss and meaning.
The New Economy by Gabrielle Calvocoressi
In The New Economy, meditations on desire, change, and adaptation result in poems that speak to the most secret parts of ourselves. Fans of Calvocoressi’s exuberant poetry will fall in love with this newest collection and its meticulous unravelling and reorganizing of aging, death, grief, joy, and gender.
Agrippina the Younger by Diana Arterian
In Agrippina the Younger, Diana Arterian excavates Agrippina, a lesser known Roman empress from a powerful political family, to reveal the structures that inform our present world. In pursuit of detail, Arterian plumbs historical accounts and museums for relics of Agrippina, haunted by the fact that Agrippina’s own son ordered her execution. Arterian’s poems imagine lost moments from Agrippina’s life, offer prose snippets of the immersive research process, and meditate on the elusive nature of power. She dove into the books and historical legacies that inspired her writing for EL here.
New and Collected Hell: A Poem by Shane McCrae
New and Collected Hell: A Poem is a book-length poem that reimagines Dante’s underworld through a contemporary lens, complete with HR-style intake interviews and hellish fax machines. Modernity aside, McCrae charts a man’s descent into an unrelenting hell of suffering, eternity, and demons. The poem takes readers to deeper levels of eternal damnation than they can possibly imagine, delivering an unforgettable, blood-soaked reading experience.
Algarabía by Roque Raquel Salas Rivera
Algarabía is an epic poem following Cenex, a trans being living on a colony of Earth in a parallel universe. Cenex undertakes a transformative journey to find a new body and a place to truly call home. The edition presents two texts, one in Puerto Rican Spanish and the other in English, exploring the complexities of language, identity, and colonial legacy. These dualities are also captured in the collection’s gorgeous cover, which Salas Rivera discussed with EL.
Cold Thief Place by Esther Lin
Cold Thief Place by Esther Lin is a debut poetry collection that draws from her experiences as an undocumented person. It reimagines her parents’ precarious journey from China to Brazil to the United States and explores growing up in a Christian fundamentalist household. Lin’s poetry is written in a confessional style that blends intimate reflection with sharp observations about displacement and exile.
Cosmic Tantrum by Sarah Lyn Rogers
Cosmic Tantrum, Taylor Byas writes, is a collection of poems that “…reminds us that a tantrum is often a result of our own inattention and neglect.” With its curated array of cultural touchstones, fairy tale tropes, and pop culture icons, Sarah Lyn Rogers’ first full-length collection coalesces into a clear criticism of a transactional and oppressive world. Rogers gathered the astrology symbols and books that occupied her mind as she wrote these poems and discussed the process with EL.
We Contain Landscapes by Patrycja Humienik
Patrycja Humienik’s new poetry collection maps the experience of immigrant daughterhood through place, ecology, and the language of the body. The central motif of this collection is the river, weaving readers through themes of disrupted lineage, the precarity of beauty, and the relationship between memory and migration. Check out our interview with Humienik, where she discusses process, place, and the key themes of the collection.
Terror Counter by Fargo Nissim Tbakhi
Fargo Nissim Tbakhi’s debut collection TERROR COUNTER takes the Gazan tunnel as its own invented visual form. It engages with imperialist legal texts in order to decompose their words and narratives, opening up space for new meaning and visions for the future to burst forth. “If poetry is anything,” says Tbakhi in his interview for EL, “it might be a way of acting like a termite and moving through the foundations of this colonial language we live inside of.”
We Had Mansions by Mandy Shunnarah
In this debut collection, queer Palestinian diaspora poet Mandy Shunnarah blends archival research with their family’s personal experiences—from their grandparents’ displacement in the Nakba to their father’s opioid addiction and their own search for community and belonging in Appalachia. Shunnarah’s poems reclaim a Palestinian identity that often felt contingent to them growing up, while also interrogating and rejecting Western media biases to assert the wholeness of Palestinian humanity. In their interview with EL, they shared their process of writing and working through questions of identity.
murmurations by Anthony Thomas Lombardi
In murmurations, Anthony Thomas Lombardi traverses themes of addiction, sobriety, grief, and the liberation of surrender. Many of the poems explore an alternate reality where Amy Winehouse made a successful attempt at sobriety. In an interview with EL, Lombardi describes his process: approaching Winehouse through second-person, transmitting her stepwork journal, and imagining quarantining with her during the COVID-19 lockdown. With care and attention to the cacophony of voices and spirits that inspired each poem, murmurations is honest about how both loss and the potential of alternate endings might haunt us.
Wildness Before Something Sublime by Leila Chatti
Language is defined by inversion and duality. In Wildness Before Something Sublime, Leila Chatti juxtaposes imagery and emotion with their opposites, rendering a sensational landscape that invites reflection. Whether drawing on a long tradition of women poets or plumbing the body’s potential for loss, Chatti approaches loss with patience and an understanding that there is a vast measure of light behind the darkness. That light comes through in these poems, like pinpricks of distant stars.
