49 Contemporary Poets on the Best Poems they Read in 2024
In the sea of endless year-end lists, poetry often seems to get sidelined, or forgotten—or maybe the critics and listmakers just aren’t reading enough poetry in the first place. Which made me wonder—what were the poets themselves reading this year? So I asked some of my favorite contemporary poets about the poems that left the biggest impression on them in 2024—and it turned out that they were reading quite a lot.
The only requirement for this list was that the selected poems should be available to read online and not behind a paywall—though readers may want to use incognito browser windows at their discretion. Because of this restriction, many wonderful poems were, of course, excluded. But the hope was to create an easy-to-access reading list: if you find yourself sitting alone in front of a fire over the holidays (or, more likely, trapped in some kind of transit purgatory), wishing you could read a really great poem, well, here are 90, at your fingertips.
Incredibly, very few poems were recommended by more than one poet. (In one particularly delightful instance, the recommending poets in question are married, and swear they hadn’t consulted with each other first.) Is this a sign that contemporary poetry is broadly excellent, un-pin-down-able, has something for everyone, etc etc? Yes, I think so.
The poets’ choices and their comments are below—with the poems mentioned more than once at the top, but otherwise in no particular order.
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“I Went Out to See All the Downed Trees” by Sasha Debevec-McKenney
originally published in The Poetry Review UK
Sasha Debevec–McKenney’s “I Went Out to See the Downed Trees” deftly captures the complicated sociopolitical tensions of our moment. What begins as neighbors surveying storm damage seamlessly transforms into an exploration of class, the social contract, and the political climate. It’s casually devastating.
–Karyna McGlynn, author of 50 Things Kate Bush Taught Me About the Multiverse
I love the veneer of simplicity in this narrative poem, and the ways in which each detail starts to add up to a slow implication of the speaker’s neighbors and their particular brand of white liberalism, leading to that gut–punch of an ending: “but these were my neighbors, and we / had to clean this up together.”
–Erika Meitner, author of Useful Junk
Debevec–McKenney uses the reordered landscape of a storm’s aftermath to consider how we respond to destruction, whether that damage is meteorological, political, or emotional. It’s part hopeful, part resigned, and all heartbreaking, salted lightly with humor.
–Rebecca Hazelton, author of Gloss
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“Black Forest” by Laura Newbern
from A Night in the Country (Changes, 2024)
From one of the most haunting collections I have encountered in some time, “Black Forest” embodies Laura Newbern’s ability to swerve, in the space of a single line sometimes, from social mannerism to autochthonous terror. Here, she transports the primordial power of the forest to the visiting-artist dinner table, with an ending somehow as astonishing as it is understated.
–Christopher Kempf, author of What Though the Field Be Lost
Laura Newbern’s A Night in the Country (Changes, 2024) is one of the most thrilling books I’ve read in a long time. This poem feels representative of the collision on mystery and control that courses throughout Newbern’s work. And her end-stops, they devastate with such quiet intensity!
–Corey Van Landingham, author of Reader, I
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“A Sunset” by Robert Hass
originally published in The New Yorker
I love this poem for the way it wends and winds so that the reader is gifted with the traveling along the ridges of Robert Hass’s extraordinary mind.
–Victoria Chang, author of With My Back to the World
Robert Hass is in his eighties, but unlike most of the older luminaries of American poetry, he is still trying to find new ways for the lyric poem to contain and interpret reality. In this poem, gun violence in America and a sunset, but not only that. I can’t say, in the end, that I think this poem absolutely works, but I have thought about it often since first reading it and I am inspired by its ambition.
–Elisa Gonzalez, author of Grand Tour
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“The Poets Awoke” by m. nourbeSe philip
originally published in Yale Review
It’s editorial malpractice to designate a poem you personally published as your favorite of the year, I think. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention this absolutely coruscating meditation on the limits of language in moments of crisis by one of the great poetic minds of our time. Here, philip takes up the perennial question of how art can bear witness to atrocity in a poem wrought less from words than from the condition of speechlessness.
–Maggie Millner, author of Couplets
I loved this poem for so many reasons, particularly in the way the poem explores the boundaries of language through language.
–Victoria Chang, author of With My Back to the World
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“Concerning Ceremonies” by Rosanna Warren
originally published in The Ceremonial
Rosanna Warren’s “Concerning Ceremonies” traces a woman’s vexed relationship with “ceremony,” organized religion, embodiment, and and art from girlhood (when she stabs an edition of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer “to punish/a sacred I didn’t know”) through an unexpected response to an adult encounter with Peter Paul Rubens’s “The Entombment” (“I don’t even like Rubens. So why / the ambush? . . . . his Entombment stopped me cold.”). As the speaker moves among disbelief in any Sky God, faith in books, a struggle with anorexia and Freudianism, a confrontation with a dead animal (“the pitiless eyes of a being who was / exactly who he was”), she closes in on an understanding of the “heart” of her story, with a new understanding of the “savage rite[s]” that, however heretically observed, can help us live.
–Lisa Russ Spaar, author of Madrigalia
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“Images from the War” by Doha Kahlout, trans. Yasmine Seale
originally published in Yale Review
I am grateful for this poem, for this poet, and for this translator. Not a light in the dark, but a poetic witness to the darkness.
–Simon Shieh, author of Master
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“At the Rainbow Cattle Company” by Bruce Snider
originally published in Poetry
Bruce Snider’s mini-crown asks big questions (“What’s faith if not what I refuse / to know?”) while anchored to the sweet and colorful grit of a gay cowboy dive bar. In a poem populated by Shania Twain and Patsy Cline, Snider coils a tight and wild music (such as when he pairs “mustache” with “Firm Ass,” a slant rhyme that thrills me) around this chance encounter that’s somehow made intimate by its inevitable distance.
–Jacques J. Rancourt, author of Brocken Spectre
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“graphic poetry” by Tyler Barton
originally published in December
Using elements of collage, found text, and visual poetry, Tyler Barton’s graphic poetry builds a project that is greater than the sum of its parts—cutting around, blacking out, or covering over the literal and figurative spaces left by lost homes. I am struck by the way the dislocated text and layered visuals create poignant ambiguities: is that a roof or a vanishing point? Is the house shouting out as it falls? This is the type of poetry that makes me want to return again and again to look more closely.
–Alison Thumel, author of Architect
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“Spring and All” by Sylvio Fraga
originally published in Copenhagen
This is such a delicate and subtle little poem, which also happens to be hilarious. My wife burst out laughing when she read it. I love the delayed diction of the opening; I love the footprints that are “the half of a heart”, how that borders on the sentimental but is instead just kind of beautiful. And mostly I love how clearly William Carlos Williams’ influence is threaded through the clarity of the voice here.
–Matthew Rohrer, author of Army of Giants
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“Seasteading: Entrepreneurial Opportunities” by Tana Jean Welch
from Parachutes Descending (University of Pittsburgh 2024)
Only Tana Jean Welch can pull off a poem that is simultaneously meditative, etymologically curious, and predicated on a dad-joke worthy pun. I could eat this with a spoon.
–Rebecca Hazelton, author of Gloss
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“Drill” by Jada Renee Allen
originally published in Poem-A-Day
This has for me been the first year of parenting and so few poems beyond my professional responsibilities have penetrated my life. But this poem brought me back not only to how exciting a poem can be but also how a poem can call you home. This poem did for me in 2024 what Gwendolyn Brooks’ “Beverly Hills Chicago” did for me 20 years ago.
–Nate Marshall, author of Finna
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“Pastoral” by Canese Jarboe
I adore the imagery and the music of this poem–the way that the ugly (seed ticks, Superfund sites, etc.) is transformed into the strangely beautiful (seed ticks becoming sequins) and the determination of the speaker to embrace it all captures the rural landscape of America. Jarboe is a brilliant poet (NEA winner, author of SISSY), and most of their poems are behind paywalls, but this one shows why people should be reading their work!
–Rebecca Dunham, author of Strike
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“Folk Song” by Diane Seuss
from Modern Poetry (Graywolf, 2024)
I discovered “Folk Song” online, and thought, “Now that is a poem.” Which is what I think of Diane Seuss’s work in general. “Folk Song” is a compelling catalogue of a body, a self, a place, a class. It’s grounded in the grit of reality and its metaphors fly on the viewless wings of Seuss’s big, beautiful imagination.
–Kim Addonizio, author of Exit Opera
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“Envoy” by Catherine Barnett
originally published in American Poetry Review
Last night I went to the movies with my wife for the first time since having a child two years ago. The movie was about a young woman who finds herself making a series of decisions, which are seemingly fine but also have the sharp edge of danger that accompany being young. Though all outcomes seem to all work out pretty well (at least for the first half of the movie), it’s the sense of danger that keeps the whole thing alive. You can feel it in your bones, that danger growing, even though it’s pretty much unsaid the whole time. That’s what I love about this poem. That, the first sentence, and the skort.
–Steven Kleinman, author of Life Cycle of a Bear
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“I Refuse to Be Intimidated By Time” by Erika Meitner
originally published in The New Yorker
In Erika Meitner’s witty, descriptive-meditative ars poetica, “I Refuse to Be Intimidated by Time,” from her forthcoming collection Assembled Audience (Milkweed Editions, 2026), a speaker whose voice is equal parts sardonic and tender considers the notion of “embodied temporal awareness,” a sense of mindful presence that crops up in the soundbites of contemporary wellness culture, sacred Jewish burial rites, and even the retail banalities of a strip-mall Target, a six-pack of sympathy cards and a pair of felt pumpkins in her hand. Meitner’s sly “refusal,” by turns cheeky and melancholy, enacts her speaker’s effort at “keeping time,” whether it’s through appreciating the dark humor in a dead gull’s grave marker, editing a friend’s mother’s obituary, or trying to fix her own mother’s broken gold watch—moments frozen in (and thereby liberated from) time that reflect the enduring art of lyric poetry.
–Anna Journey, author of The Judas Ear
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“The Child Who Follows the Child Who Dies” by Matt Poindexter
originally published in The 2River View
Full disclosure: this one’s by a friend. But this sonnet had had me by the throat from “tar-dark doorway,” totally devastated me before it arrived in the field, and then reminded me that joy will find us again.
–Ross White, author of Charm Offensive
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“The Picture Tin” by Sahar Muradi
from Octobers (University of Pittsburgh 2023)
This remarkably condensed poem explores the syntax of displacement in the wake of war’s forced migrations and exiles. And yet, like the titular tin itself, Muradi’s poem offers a form that holds family and memory and culture in all their ongoing surprise, mystery, suffering, and love.
–Brian Teare, author of Poem Bitten by a Man
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“Art of War” by Rashed Aqrabawi
originally published in BOMB
As in a suspenseful scene in a horror film, the silences haunting this poem are precise, embodied. “I was searching for a missing person,” writes Aqrabawi, and in this poem, that missing person is everywhere.
–Simon Shieh, author of Master
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“Phyllodes Reveries” by Rebecca Hawkes
originally published in Palette Poetry
Rebecca Hawkes’s poem slips under my skin like a sonic dream scalpel—I love how she dissects the self with luminous precision, unearthing tumors named for leaves and secrets “pearl-firm” like pigeon eggs. Her lines blur the boundaries between body and nature, making me itch and bloom simultaneously.
–Karyna McGlynn, author of 50 Things Kate Bush Taught Me About the Multiverse
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“A Violet Darkness” by Najwan Darwish
originally published in Poem-A-Day
I loved everything Sawako Nakayasu curated for poem-a-day during the month of September, but this brief lyric by Palestinian writer Najwan Darwish cut me to the quick. The poem, for me, opens up a momentary space for grief: a portal into the “violet darkness” where the unfathomable human toll of Israel’s occupation and genocide in Palestine might be mourned and reckoned with before the fight resumes.
–Maggie Millner, author of Couplets
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“[…]” by Fady Joudah
originally published in Poem-A-Day
“[…]” by Fady Joudah pins ongoing violence within the lush realm of the lyric—Joudah’s lines are emotionally and philosophically charged, both vital and symphonic.
–Athena Nassar, author of Little Houses
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“Elegy Against Elegies” by Kenzie Allen
originally published in The Adroit Journal
I love the paradox of this poem, its incantations and wisdom, its kinetic-ness, and the way it inhabits the entirety of the page. It’s a powerful prayer-spell that simultaneously leans into loss and resists it: “This is an elegy against elegy, /a song against the song of our demise.”
–Erika Meitner, author of Useful Junk
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“People Walk Around” by Frederick Seidel
originally published in The New York Review of Books
Of all the poems I read this year (that are available online and not beyond a paywall) this is the poem that feels the most memorable and remarkable. I love how the form builds and breaks, builds and breaks. It’s a little like walking through the garden that is his neighborhood while time traveling. What is most exciting to me is the heartbreak of the ending, an ending that feels inevitable and surprising all at once, that your song is the first step to being human, that you don’t make it to a second.
–Steven Kleinman, author of Life Cycle of a Bear
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“You Are Who I Love” by Aracelis Girmay
originally appeared in The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database
–Fady Joudah, author of […]
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“Relentlessly Grief-Stricken and Enjoying the End of Spring Flowers” by Maya Marshall
originally published in American Poetry Review
I’m astonished by the scope of Maya Marshall’s poem. It shifts, surprises, and delights. It’s sad, funny, biting. It sings. It’s a poem that makes me want to step my game up.
–Derrick Austin, author of Tenderness
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“My Father Visits My Brother in Jail” by Faisal Mohyuddin
originally published in Poetry
If a poem can be a portal through which radical care may travel, through which the voices of beloveds may speak (or attempt to), where the language of silence, of the withheld and unsaid and subterranean, may be given the opportunity to sing, then “My Father Visits My Brother in Jail,” is a “forever-long reminder” that healing and care is a practice that extends much beyond the physical body, and that love can be found in grief, in the wound that a beloved’s absence creates. As Moyhuddin writes through the blended voice of Father and Brother: “I miss my children. / Then you will be okay.”
–Darius Atefat-Peckham, author of Book of Kin
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“Snowdrops” by Erica McAlpine
originally published in Bad Lilies
I admire the chromatic soundscape of this poem played against the delicate grey-scale of its imagery.
–A.E. Stallings, author of This Afterlife
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“Anthroposcenery” by Spencer Short
originally published in Zocalo Public Square
Spencer Short writes some of the most richly textural poems, truly in love with the sound of language, the crunch and the lunge of meaning, the joy of words because they are words and within them, everything. There is something of Gregory Hill in here by way of John Cheever, which is to say they are best drawled laconically by a handsome youth in a crisp white shirt, lazy waving an un-ashed cigarette while pretending these hard won truths are just tossed off nothings.
–Rebecca Hazelton, author of Gloss
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“You Summon Me” by Charles Martin
originally published in Hudson Review
A witty and profoundly perceptive meditation on tradition and originality (if there is such a thing as the latter), written in the Rubaiyyat stanza of Omar Khayyam.
–Rachel Hadas, author of Ghost Guest
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“There Are More Ways to Show Devotion” by Hanif Abdurraqib
originally published in Yale Review
There’s a question in the middle of this poem that guts me, and some other poet may have let the poem stop there, but Abdurraqib asks the poem to expand and expand until we arrive somewhere entirely surprising.
–Keith Leonard, author of Ramshackle Ode
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“Homeland Security Agent” by Esther Lin
I am first made curious by the title, a term increasingly found in current events. I believe the pov is from that federal position. The opening does not immediately captivate this atheist (me) but the enjambment offsets and I’m plunged into the fourteen lines. What I find most compelling aside from the characterization of migrants, are the sounds. They are not in any pattern, but they slyly work on my ear: ‘servant,’ ‘dismant/le’ … ‘spring,’ ‘kings’; ‘home,’ ‘home,’ ‘foam,’ ‘stone,’ ‘alone’ (as well as syllables that end in -n and -m). I am drawn by the current subject and charmed by the sonic craft.
–Kimiko Hahn, author of Foreign Bodies
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“Art After War” by Oksana Maksymchuk
originally published in Cincinnati Review
I am in love with the trajectory of linguistic transformation in this poem, the energetic tension it cultivates between violent destruction and creation, the surreal and associative dream-logic that eventually parts to say the heartbreaking truth of reality so simply: that “lives are fragile & can get broken.”
–Sara Eliza Johnson, author of Vapor
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“Plant Parenthood” by Emily Skaja
originally published in American Poetry Review
Emily Skaja’s “Plant Parenthood” hits me like a psychic heatwave off hot asphalt—I love how she confronts loss amid the chain-link fences and razor wire, blending the personal with the political. The way she wraps her grief in a gauze of dark humor gets me every time.
–Karyna McGlynn, author of 50 Things Kate Bush Taught Me About the Multiverse
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“Erin Therese” by Kaitlyn Airy
originally published in The Chestnut Review
A sense of selfhood, of identity over time, is a palimpsest for anyone, but perhaps especially for someone who has been adopted and renamed as a child. The speaker in Katie Airy’s “Erin Therese” ponders the name and experiences of the dead woman whose name she was given by her birth mother in honor of the mother’s deceased friend. “Who was I when I was given this name / in the womb of my first mother, before it was changed?” the poet asks. The speaker contends with her “mythic past” and is given “permission to release / what rattles inside the cage of me” when a friend tells her “no one chooses their parents.” In this way, Airy writes, “I am ordinary, and it is a strange relief.”
–Lisa Russ Spaar, author of Madrigalia
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“Interview” by Jordan Kapono Nakamura
originally published in Poem-A-Day
I’ve been thinking about the legibility of class in an industry dominated by wealth—what we mean when we talk about craft, and the time, energy, and access afforded writers. This poem lyricizes precarity through the voice of someone being interviewed for a job and having to argue for their value. The poem was published in January and has stayed with me all year.
–K. Iver, author of Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco
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“The Bluebird” by Karen Solie
originally published in Liberties
“The Bluebird,” at once dreamlike and hard-headed, ponders both memory and the ways life works – its expectations and chances and disappointments – compressing a wealth of insight and experience into a seemingly simple lyric.
–Rachel Hadas, author of Ghost Guest
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“Fable” by Andrea Cohen
originally published in Poetry
I love how this poem uses the animals of Aesop’s Fables to comment on their own tropes, as though to undo the structure of the fable itself. This poem makes me think about apathy and its dangers, and how this poem resonates so much with our present moment. As the poem reminds us, the fox will still be there, “helping / the chicken out of her feathers.”
–Tyler Mills, author of Hawk Parable
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“Mirror After Merrill” by Jameson Fitzpatrick
originally published in Angel Food
I love this poem’s intertextual sauciness, the way it speaks to (and returns me to) James Merrill’s “Mirror,” with an irreverent tone and a formal control that is, in a way, homage (or claim) to Merrill’s own. I admire, too, that a poem of disappointed hopes is nonetheless so filled with pleasures of language and image. It is not a sad poem, though it has sadness in it.
–Elisa Gonzalez, author of Grand Tour
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“Soldier / Canada” by Tomaž Šalamun, trans. by Brian Henry
from Kiss the Eyes of Peace (Milkweed, 2024)
“Soldier/Canada” is classic Šalamun, in the style of his famous “Jonah” poem. I love the flatness of the exchange here, and the surprise of the ending, the surprising mundanity of it. Šalamun was a thousand different poets in one and this is his wry, winking self at its best. Henry’s new translations are also extremely refreshing.
–Matthew Rohrer, author of Army of Giants
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“Eurydice” by Jenny George
“Eurydice” manages, wonderfully, to seem to be perfectly clear, and yet also to be finally unresolvable, inexhaustible.
–Shane McCrae, author of Cain Named the Animal
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“Grease Angels” by Athena Nassar
originally published in Poetry
“You make the tender parts of me sing,” Athena Nassar writes in her poem “Grease Angels”—a poem that sings love and care for a sibling who is really an extension of the speaker’s self, reminding us that the ways we are different from our beloveds can also be the ways they complete us—reminding us of the “you” of a beloved that is left behind, that makes a home forever inside the “I.”
–Darius Atefat-Peckham, author of Book of Kin
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“The Mannequin Leaves the Hospital for the Last Time Happy” by Angela Voras-Hills
originally published in North American Review
The new mother as mannequin is a powerful metaphor. But really it is the combination of the title and the last line that gives me chills. So heartbreaking.
–Rebecca Dunham, author of Strike
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“dramatic monologue as Beatriz Ferreyra” by Stella Wong
originally published in Poetry
Stella Wong’s “dramatic monologue as Beatriz Ferreyra” blew me away on first reading—as it has done so on subsequent readings, several of which were my best attempts to read the poem in reverse, as it seems to ask one to do, from the self-composed opening line, “this is some decomposed music,” to its last three, “this is like that // satanist music where they / play it backwards. or so I’ve heard.” Play it backwards. Play it forwards. But by all means, play it on repeat! And linger over those devilishly good line breaks.
–Devon Walker-Figueroa, author of Philomath
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“PALESTINIAN” by Ibrahim Nasrallah, trans. Huda Fakhreddine
originally published in Protean Magazine
Words like “favorite” do not belong here. I feel to read it with my eyes closed. Sent to me by a beautiful poet, I share it now, with profound and deepest gratitude to translator and scholar Huda Fakhreddine.
–Aracelis Girmay, author of the black maria
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“Night Animals” by Sebastian Merrill
originally published in Cortland Review
Sebastian Merrill’s portrait of a relationship offers a startling constellation of sounds. I am immediately drawn in by sleep/sheets and husband/man/again. There is not a regular pattern, rather, an array of repetition. One example: words or syllables that end in -t, -st, -ts ; from Night in the title to against, sheets, left, start. Midway this repetition falls away and syllables that end in -n, -nd come to the fore. I confess that I’ve become impatient with poems that do not present this sonic element. And wooed by a poem that resonates.
–Kimiko Hahn, author of Foreign Bodies
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“Abundance” by Rick Barot
originally published in Yale Review
Milosz, Larkin, Dickinson, and a bucket of fried chicken: Rick Barot has authored one of my favorite poems about abundance, about being filled with wonder, even when the thing we marvel at is a burr.
–Ross White, author of Charm Offensive
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“00000000” by Erin Marie Lynch
from Removal Acts (Graywolf, 2023)
Erin Marie Lynch’s wry, self-reflexive lyric poem “00000000,” from her debut collection Removal Acts (Graywolf Press, 2023), takes its title from the longtime nuclear launch code at U.S. weapons silos and, through an interrogation of debt and desire, money and power, considers the many zeros that haunt and constrain her speaker, both personally and ontologically. Lynch’s nuanced sense of the pressures of lyric (how to write about lovers with trust funds, one’s economic fragility, or the country’s militarized spending) accrues in ironic, luminous fragments that startle with their unlikely eros: “You (Fed Loan Servicing) / lifted delicate unagi /to my lips as I reclined / on a white leather sofa.”
–Anna Journey, author of The Judas Ear
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“Ballad” by Diane Seuss
from Modern Poetry (Graywolf 2024)
I love the fierceness of this poem. I love how it unravels and unravels into the dark webs of unwanted memory.
–Victoria Chang, author of With My Back to the World
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“Dear […]” by Fady Joudah
originally published in Prairie Schooner
In an interview in The London Magazine earlier this year, Fady Joudah says: “Palestinians make English nervous when we are simultaneities within ourselves, irreducible.” Also disturbing English is Joudah’s study of its common indoctrinations and sayings; he sometimes works in its (near)sounds and syntactical anticipations to make it say something clearly, and true. “Kill and tell. And my kin, they’re always asking for nothing. / Then it’s always something you make them beg for.” Each line, a pleat. Compression and capaciousness. Bolts of analysis and something most tender. These are among the angles in the poem’s prism, but the spectrum of light I held to my face months ago—and, still, now—are made by these words, turning the language by degrees, indomitable and ceaseless in that way: “Did I stay away? / How away? How alone, my alone.” Sacred, mournful shouts across lines and generations. A text clarified by its listening and relation, by its being forged and sustained by what is outside of the poem’s marks, beyond its English. “In Arabic. Say them to me, / to my grass, my living, and my dead.”
–Aracelis Girmay, author of the black maria
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“The Dream Where Iʼm Dreaming of the Future” by Joseph Omoh Ndukwu
originally published in Waxwing
That this poem, which reads like a poet’s dream of a novel, can hold such unassuming language as “She helped me,” and not only hold it but make me feel it deeply, is testament to the intricacy of its texture, the force of the dreamwork.
–Simon Shieh, author of Master
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“Equation” by Rosalie Moffett
originally published in The Adroit Journal
Despite it all, we can’t escape the drive to continue the chain. And I’ve seen few give voice to the disorienting mixture of emotions that accompanies a pregnancy test and the future it might (or might not) portend with the playfulness, humor, lyricism, and levity that Moffett does in “Equation.”
–Casey Thayer, author of Self-Portrait with Spurs and Sulphur
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“Crown Shyness” by A.E. Stallings
originally published in Sewanee Review
“Crown Shyness,” a crown of sonnets, is not only a triumphant feat of formal mastery but also a profound evocation of trees, of light, of process, and of Homer’s Odyssey.
–Rachel Hadas, author of Ghost Guest
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“When My Beloved Proenza Schouler Tries to Sell Lei for $1,500” by Noe Piters
originally published in Poetry
It’s rare to find a concrete poem that isn’t undermined by its own formal cleverness. Piters manages to be both formally inventive and pointed in her poetic critique.
–Bruce Snider, author of Fruit
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“God is Dog Spelled Backwards” by Daniella Toosie-Watson
originally published in Poetry Northwest
2024 was such an epically terrible year! I honestly don’t know how I intend to celebrate NYE; perhaps I will make a little effigy of 2024 and light it on fire. Anyway, this poem by Daniella Toosie-Watson delighted me in a year when delight was in short supply. The premise of the poem is in the title, but the swap of “dog” for “god” is still funny and somehow surprising every time it resurfaces. I love the idea of a little pack of gods competing to be alpha, “top god.” And I thought the poem’s turn toward grief at the end was fresh and moving. Daniella Toosie-Watson is a new poet to me, but I’m looking forward to their first book coming out in fall 2025 (WHAT WE DO WITH GOD, Haymarket Books).
–Emily Skaja, author of Brute
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“My Brother” by Paisley Rekdal
originally published in AGNI
Paisley Rekdal’s poem “My Brother” reckons with how grief and longing are constantly in conversation with one another. This poem is indulgent in its grief, laying bare the overwhelming desire for tenderness and companionship.
–Athena Nassar, author of Little Houses
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“The Black Outside” by Joy Priest
originally published in Poem-A-Day
This poem feels radical in its celebration of nature, Blackness, of being alive in the current (always fraught) moment. It is brim with velvet music, conjures the ecologies of lyric and craft with that of nature. It is urgent, nudging, it dances with you and hugs you at the same time. I turn to this poem over and over to reorient myself toward the present, toward being together, being with.
–Diana Khoi Nguyen, author of Root Fractures
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“My Education” by Diane Seuss
from Modern Poetry (Graywolf 2024)
Dianne Seuss poem “My Education” was included in her book Modern Poetry which came out this year. The poem is frank about the ecosystem of her poetics and working class origins. Like the entire book, the mood of “My Education” is both reflective and immediate.
–K. Iver, author of Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco
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“Recipe to Recover” by Camonghne Felix
originally published in Boston Review
This poem is a string of resuscitations in image, syntax, sound. Flowers to wear around the neck, crawling into life. I am touched by its glitches (moments of irregularity like that cap in “The salts of my ladies?”). And I am touched by the multiple things that “but touched” can mean, and by the list of what must be done to not be killed: “it had to be done / like this, though troublesome, it / had to be my hand in the river…” A procession of actions. What was needed and what “I” wanted to resist. A trace that can be called upon again if ever again. To me the poem is the making and the shedding of a skin, like the stories I’ve heard of female spirits who shapeshift in and out of pelts. And all those mirrors in the sound, words shedding, one sound lengthening into a later, Other one, revealing a survival, a relation… alert, dirt, heart. To speak of it opens the throat.
–Aracelis Girmay, author of the black maria
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“Fathead” by Ishion Hutchinson
originally published in Yale Review
The voice in “Fathead” is a voice perfected and entire, and the poem reminded (and reminds) me of the pleasure of listening to a great talker talk in a poem.
–Shane McCrae, author of Cain Named the Animal
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“The Room” by Emily Berry
originally published in The New York Review of Books
and
“No Consolation” by Suzanne Buffam
originally published in The New York Review of Books
I was about to board a plane when the extraordinary poet Suzanne Buffam sent me this “perfectly appointed room” of a poem by Emily Berry, and I sat in that uncanny room the duration of the whole flight home. When I landed, I climbed out its dark window, outside of which “night fell like/unpinned hair,” into Suzanne’s poem, published two years earlier in the same publication. What a disconsolate pairing of period rooms they make together! I suggest visiting them in an endless loop.
–Robyn Schiff, author of Information Desk
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“At The End There is Always a House” by Sara Eliza Johnson
It’s a meditation on desire in 15 lines. The final line is one word, evoking a broken sonnet in my reading. The poem places the reader at a vivid site and rewards them with a voice that knows itself. I won’t spoil it!
–K. Iver, author of Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco
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“Horny in Wyoming” by Adele Williams
originally published in Los Angeles Review
I’m drawn to the speaker in this poem, her stream–of–consciousness voice, and the poem’s wild figurative language and unexpected turns. Williams has a shifty and exacting way of giving language to the nuances of female desire.
–Erika Meitner, author of Useful Junk
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“Mid–Thirties Square Dance” by Elizabeth Metzger
originally published in Poetry
With a cannily droll touch, Metzger interlaces the metaphysical with the embodied and quotidian, wafting us into the vulnerability of “what awe actually is.”
–Malachi Black, author of Indirect Light
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“Transfusion” by Shara Lessley
I love the ease and dreaminess of this poem, which continues to reveal itself in new and startling ways the more you read it.
–Bruce Snider, author of Fruit
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“Americans” by Katie Peterson
originally published in Poetry Northwest
I love the poem (which appears in Peterson’s 2024 collection Fog and Smoke), for the way its soft lines and quiet figures subtly accommodate a history of Western migration. And I especially love its structure—the way it thinks about the American spirit and lays it bare. (This link is to an earlier version is at Poetry Northwest’s web site.)
–Laura Newbern, author of A Night in the Country
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“In Utero and After” by Catherine Barnett
originally published in Yale Review
I learn so much from Catherine Barnett’s bracing, brilliant poems, in part because the poems are themselves always learning—earnest studies in how to be a human.
–Rachel Mannheimer, author of Earth Room
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“Self–Elegies” by Martha Silano
originally published in Poetry
This deeply personal and heartbreaking poem thrives in the muscled and musical language I find in much of Silano’s work. Wordplay ebbs at the grief of facing death straight on, though wonder and awe win over in a vibrant consideration of a life deeply lived.
–Matthew Nienow, author of If Nothing
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“Second Theory” by Andrew Chi Keong Yim
originally published in Washington Square Review
All five of Andrew’s poems in this issue are so good—may you read them all and be blessed! Holy, funny, heartbreaking, real, urgent, alive.
–Chessy Normile, author of Great Exodus, Great Wall, Great Party
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“An Attempt at Assimilation” by Saadi Youssef, trans. Khaled Mattawa
originally published in Plume
Plume is a favorite online journal. And I believe it’s important to include translations in our lives. Saadi Youssef is a poet whose work I do not know. “Attempt at Assimilation” is translated from Arabic by poet Khaled Mattawa. The poem’s title sets up assimilation as the theme and the ritual to walking around a duck pond places this activity as a metaphor for assimilation. I especially admire the way Youssef includes bits of current events as ordinary detail, which for me, beats with apprehension. I love, too, that Plume includes the original for us to see.
–Kimiko Hahn, author of Foreign Bodies
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“Redeem” by Rosalie Moffett
originally published in Poetry
Rosalie Moffett’s marvelous “Redeem” deftly explores the cultural, systemic, and institutional commodification of one of life’s most intimate experiences, the birth of a child (“Each Tylenol, / a tiny egg in the nest // of the nurse’s cupped hand, rematerialized weeks later / on the itemized bill”). What do we value, what does society demand in ransom, and why? The poem feels prescient as we enter another Trump presidency, evoking a much needed, alternative and deeply humane sense of nationhood and borders as delivery becomes deliverance (“I had been the nation / you lived in,” the speaker addresses her child–to–come. “Like a shore // in lapping water, / you made your borders // expand a little / with each breath”).
–Lisa Russ Spaar, author of Madrigalia
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“Handfuls” by Hua Xi
originally published in Yale Review
Hua Xi’s “Handfuls” opens with a playful gesture: throwing a handful of snow. The snow accumulates meaning as the poem develops. It’s snow, and it isn’t. It’s all play and it isn’t.
–Derrick Austin, author of Tenderness
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“The Palace of Forty Pillars” by Armen Davoudian
excerpted from The Palace of Forty Pillars (Tin House, 2024)
What does it mean to have your identity halved or doubled or made whole by the mirror of perception? What love do we all wait for to confirm our existence, our right to be in the world? What do we do if that love seemingly never arrives? Armen Davoudian’s poem “The Palace of Forty Pillars” is a beautifully wrought interrogation of self and self–perception, how we estrange self and home in our art and, in that estrangement, can find home and self again.
–Darius Atefat–Peckham, author of Book of Kin
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“Dear Absent” by Marcus Wicker
originally published in American Poetry Review
Wicker’s “Dear Absent,” is a discombobulating onslaught, mimetic of the full–throttle social media landscape we swim in. But right at the end, the waters part, it slows and, through the rush of language, touches something heartachingly raw and quieting. I sat in that silence after finishing it for a while.
–Casey Thayer, author of Self–Portrait with Spurs and Sulphur
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“My Grandmother’s Dictionary” by Matthew Zapruder
originally published in The New Yorker
This poem can be found in Zapruder’s collection I Love Hearing Your Dreams, which came out earlier this year. Like in so many of that book’s poems, Zapruder’s attentive eye draws out the mystery in the everyday.
–Keith Leonard, author of Ramshackle Ode
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“Stripshot” by Jan Beatty
originally published in Copper Nickel
I love Jan Beatty’s poems, and this one is a standout—fierce, erotic, and in your face. What isn’t there to love?
–Bruce Snider, author of Fruit
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“Phusis” by Mei–mei Berssenbrugge
originally published in Poetry
I didn’t read another poem in 2024 that offered more comfort and joy. “Phusis” gives readers access to fresh ontological bliss and humility in the face of the sacred interconnectedness of all Life.
–Brian Teare, author of Poem Bitten by a Man
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“The Killing Spree” by Jorie Graham
originally published in The New York Review of Books
The onrush of Jorie Graham’s recent poems is a motion unlike any motions in poems before it. It is an onrush that somehow both dislocates the reader with regard to place, and firmly positions the reader with regard to time.
–Shane McCrae, author of Cain Named the Animal
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“Sonnet Unrequited” by Keenan Teddy
originally published in Glass: A Journal of Poetry
Keenan Teddy’s “Sonnet Unrequited” is formally playful, but also reminds me of Elizabethan love sonnets. Like those early sonneteers, Teddy slyly explores the heart’s terrain.
–Derrick Austin, author of Tenderness
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“Cento for the Night I Tried Stand Up” by Sasha Debevec-McKenney
originally published in Yale Review
Every year, every poem, forever! The poet laureate of my heart and soul. This is the first poem in Sasha’s forthcoming debut book Joy is My Middle Name.
–Chessy Normile, author of Great Exodus, Great Wall, Great Party
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“from FLAG” by Imani Elizabeth Jackson
from FLAG (Futurepoem, 2024)
I’ve been anticipating Jackson’s book, FLAG, for years now; I trust her voice entirely. “Certain facts stand,” she asserts here, and the poem flows forward with its steady, searching wisdom.
–Rachel Mannheimer, author of Earth Room
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“Poetry is the supreme killjoy” by Tilsa Otta, trans. Farid Marduk
originally published in Poetry
I’ve been reading a lot of translation lately and one of my favorite new poets is the Peruvian writer Tilsa Otta as translated by Farid Matuk. Graywolf recently published her first volume in English, “The Hormone of Darkness: A Playlist.” Her work (and particularly this poem) is funny and limber and full of the kinds of unexpected images that make me want to share her poetry with everyone I meet. It’s that kind of sharable poem.
–Adrian Matejka, author of Somebody Else Sold the World
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“Go Back Into Yourself” by Wesley Rothman
originally published in Missouri Review
I was immediately taken by the mysterious imperative of the title and fully won over by the confident declarations of self–introspection mapped over an imagined physical world. Though the poem is far from personally revealing, it is tender and intimate—more powerfully so each time I reread it.
–Matthew Nienow, author of If Nothing
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“Daily Verses: 16” by Marigloria Palma, trans. Carina del Valle Schorske
originally published in The New York Review of Books
It’s a travesty that an English translation of Marigloria Palma’s work does not yet exist, but del Valle Schorske has been translating her work for years now, and I welcome each publication. Such intensity of emotion pressed against strangeness of image. Since I read this poem, on days when 2024 has seemed overwhelming, I’ve recalled the “hard little demons” “whistling in this pentagram called ‘up–to–date.’”
–Elisa Gonzalez, author of Grand Tour
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“When My Brother Visits We Play Hide and Seek” by Steven Espada Dawson
Steven’s poems.. what can I even say!? He’s the archangel of metaphor and transformation. This poem is in his forthcoming debut book Late to the Search Party.
–Chessy Normile, author of Great Exodus, Great Wall, Great Party
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“Invisible Work” by Kwoya Fagin Maples
originally published in Poem-A-Day
I think the work of this poem presses brilliantly again the backdrop of invisible labor (from family, teachers, community members). And that last couplet drops like two perfect reminders of how all of this work continues.
–Matthew Minicucci, author of Translation
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“Open Letter to a Politician” by janan alexandra
originally published in Sixth Finch
“Open Letter to a Politician” is plea and prayer and defiant declaration all in one. It deftly calls out the necessary banalities of government and criticizes the ways in which they’re often given priority in the face of human suffering, but Lord, those final lines fill me with such hope.
–Ross White, author of Charm Offensive
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“Clarity” by Vievee Francis
originally published in Poem-A-Day
This is one of those poems that stuns me with the power of its brevity. Two brief sentences are carefully paced out over eight short lines in which the lofty concepts of sorrow and grief are made real and almost graspable in the form of a flock of blackbirds wheeling into twilight.
–Matthew Nienow, author of If Nothing
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“The Lord’s Corner” by Tyree Daye
originally published in Poem-A-Day
I’m a huge fan of anything that Tyree Daye writes, but this stunning poem wrecked and saved me, especially the last couplet, which has lingered and echoed in my mind as a reminder that what we need to survive is found within the self. Daye is deft with his sense of poetic breath, infusing his lines with incredible music, and I’m in awe as I track and unpack his brilliant imagination circling and cohering in this remarkable, heartrending, and ultimately hopeful poem that reckons with death, violence, and madness.
–Tiana Clark, author of I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood
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“The Deal” by Ryan Eckes
from Wrong Heaven Again (Birds LLC)
Did you think 2024 was a garbage fire? Wait ’til you meet 2025! Eckes’ poem offers fuel for the continued fight.
–Brian Teare, author of Poem Bitten by a Man
