Thank you so much for your support of Poetry Daily! As a thank you for your generosity, please enjoy this list of Poetry Daily’s staff’s favorite books published in 2025. We hope that your new year is full of good cheer and good reading.
Walter Ancarrow, Etymologies
(Omnidawn Publishing, 2023)
Chosen by Peter Streckfus
Co-Editorial Director, Poetry Daily
In the fall of 2024, the Poetry Daily editorial committee passed Walter Ancarrow’s Etymologies around like a treasure, electrified by its sculptural, Calvinoesque intelligence. On the page whose entry uses the history of the word map as its center, Ancarrow sites Muhammad al-Idrisi, a twelfth-century Arab Muslim geographer and cartographer, who describes the folded map as a “fabric of space-time” that “transpos[es] orient with occident”: “Only the folded map is a holy text—its symbols unseen, its referent a thought with no edge.” Each poem in this book-length sequence, also a folded map of space-time, reads the unsayable in its gathers. Book, as Ancarrow folds it, touches beech, touches geniza, the place of rest for sacred texts, worn from being touched, and then grows beyond us. Here is Ancarrow’s entry for that word in full: “In the Synagogue of the Logos, a rabbi interred the geniza, those sacred texts containing His unutterable name. In a distant land, book grew out of Proto-Germanic bokiz, the beech tree. In burying what is unsayable we allow it to take root and then tower over us.” Read more.
Gabrielle Calcovoressi, The New Economy
(Copper Canyon Press, 2025)
Chosen by Dana Levin
Editorial Board Member, Poetry Daily
Gabrielle Calvocoressi‘s new book, The New Economy, chronicles the struggle for radical acceptance: every human being comes from a cistern of golden light and the blade-light of harm—which light will guide you today? What I love most about this book is how Calvocoressi take us on their daily walks through this choice, between kindness and cruelty, generosity and greed. Compassionate, exacting, self-honest, and full of daily joy—music and beekeeping, friends and food—The New Economy brings the medicine for what ails us. Read more on December 3rd.
Arthur Sze, Into the Hush
(Copper Canyon Press, 2025)
Jennifer Atkinson
Editorial Board Member, Poetry Daily
Among so many fine new books this year, how do I choose a “favorite?” It’s like deciding which is more beautiful—a great blue heron or a goldfinch? I will take solace in the word “favorite,” which allows for both a spontaneous, off-the-cuff answer as well as for the allegiance and prejudice of long love. Arthur Sze’s latest, Into the Hush stole my heart—re-stole it, really. I’ll admit I’ve loved Sze’s work a long time. Who doesn’t? How not to love this poet’s luminous images, his lines, gorgeous and spare, the formal balance of poems and sequences, and overall—especially now—his wide, compassionate, grief- and joy-struck vision of the wholeness and simultaneity of all earthly lives. Read more.
George Abraham & Noor Hindi, eds.,
Heaven Looks Like Us
(Haymarket Books, 2025)
Chosen by Holly Mason Badra
Editorial Reader, Poetry Daily
At once timely and timeless, Heaven Looks Like Us, edited by George Abraham and Noor Hindi, is more than an anthology—it is an orchard, ripe and brimming. Through a Palestinian lens and landscape, this book offers incredible range— in voice, in vantage point, in style, in intersections. Spanning geographical contexts, when gathered together, the voices in this collection echo and harmonize; they sing for Gaza, they sing for Palestine. Curated with immeasurable care, these are poems of loss, love, and liberation. Read more.
Colin Bramwell, Fower Pessoas
(Carcanet Press, 2025)
Chosen by Lesley Smith
Senior Editor, Poetry Daily
Portuguese-language poet Fernando Pessoa died, a modernist enigma, in 1935. In 2025, in Fower Pessoas, award-winning translator and poet Colin Bramwell unleashes, in an agile, witty and acerbic Scots, a Fernando Pessoa for the twenty-first century. With a fluidity standard English cannot match, these Scots versions swing, in terse syllables and long lines, from grave-side irony to the fragile bonhomie that ends in tears, always human, always alive. Read more.
Sid Ghosh, yellow flower gills me whole
(Milkweed Editions, 2025)
Chosen by Riley Johnston
Editorial Assistant, Poetry Daily
Sid Ghosh’s debut collection is a meditation on humanity’s prejudice through the lens of the most often misunderstood. Through syrupy soundwork and language that bends meaning, Ghosh asks the reader to examine their own judgements about the LGBTQ+ community, autism, and people with Down Syndrome. By detailing his own lived experience, he traverses the poetic land of the unknown. At just 18 years old, the creativity and brevity of this collection inspires confrontation and demands praise. Read more.
Jack Saebyok Jung, Hocus Pocus Bogus Locus
(Black Square Editions, 2025)
Chosen by Heather Green
Editorial Board Member, Poetry Daily
I first discovered Jack Saebyok Jung’s writing through his translations of Korean poet Yi Sang, and recently, on Poetry Daily, I discovered his debut poetry book, Hocus Pocus Bogus Locus. In poems of youth, poems of filial love, speculative poems, and poems that grapple with his relationship, as an immigrant to the US, between country and home, his collection has the quality, typical of a debut, of a whole life spoken into the book, and yet the work has the formal deftness and nuance of a poet who has worked for decades at his craft. For Jung, poetry speaks, as he states this superb essay, from “deep unpolished being, the sensory self that existed before we learned speech, a quiver perhaps older than memory,” and holds poetry’s supposed triviality in the same hand with its political and primal necessity. Read more.
Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, Something About Living
(University of Akron Press, 2025)
Chosen by Robin Myers
Editorial Board Member, Poetry Daily
Something About Living plumbs the history and present of Palestinian dispossession, apartheid, and genocide under the Israeli state; the hypocrisies and imperial violence underpinning contemporary US-American life; and the enduring losses, injustices, and longings of Palestinian life outside Palestine. Tuffaha’s brilliant use of repetition offers fleeting snapshots of inhabitation and loss, landscape and memory. “Repetition is a Nakba,” she wrote in her previous book, Kaan and Her Sisters. Here, though, it’s also the site of endless change: a life force that both circumvents and contends with destruction, through language and beyond it. Read more.
Yannis Ritsos, Exercises 1950-1960
(Ugly Duckling Presse, 2025)
Chosen by Eric Pankey
Editorial Board Member, Poetry Daily
I recommend Yannis Ritsos’ Exercises 1950-1960, translated by Spring Ulmer and published by Ugly Duckling Presse. Ritsos, whose poems offer a lyric clarity and austerity, whether short lyrics or mythic/epic explorations, attract me with their precision and candor. These “exercises” are mostly short poems, each fitting on a page, were written in the aftermath of his torture and detention during the Greek Civil War. Ritsos, who resisted the fascist government as a Communist, was imprisoned a number of times during his life.. Parable-like, the poems confront oppression at a slant. If you find you like this book, I recommend all his books, in particular two favorites, Exile and Return and Monochords. Read more.
Sayumi Kamakura, Applause for a Cloud
Translated by James Shea
(Black Ocean, 2025)
Chosen by Maeve Flusser
Editorial Assistant, Poetry Daily
Get ready to immerse yourself into the beautiful world of Haiku. James Shea’s translation of Sayumi Kamakura’s poetry is divided into four sections: Light, Sand, Clouds, and Wind. While, short, the poems are far from simple, making observations that remind the reader of the magic, intrigue, and sadness in everyday life. From the absurdity of asking a sunflower for advice to the mundanity of peeling a banana at 2pm, Shea’s imagery is an absolute delight. This is a book I will come back to again and again. Read more.
Patrycja Humienik, We Contain Landscapes
(Tin House, 2025)
Chosen by Elena Macdonald
Managing Editor, Poetry Daily
Patrycja Humienik’s debut collection examines what it means to belong — to a place, to a nation, to a lineage, to each other. Humienik, daughter of Polish immigrants, interweaves conversations about the body and land, considering borders, desire, & longing. She incorporates lush sensory details to help the reader consider what it means to connect with our past and each other. If you’re interested in poems about diaspora, belonging, memory, and kinship, this is the collection for you. Read more.
Rosanna Warren, Hindsight
(W. W. Norton & Co., 2025)
Chosen by Michaela Godding
Editorial Assistant, Poetry Daily
Rosanna Warren’s newest collection bravely offers the unavoidable, and yet tender, human experience of violence. Initially inspired by Covid-19, these poems explore the palpable truth that brutality and humanity are unavoidably connected. Making large jumps in both content and form, Warren masterfully weaves between the powers of fact and story to convey the disquietude of myth, politics, and even grocery shopping during a pandemic. This collection offers a lens to readers who are unafraid to look around at the world’s ruin and see both all and none of themselves amongst it. Read more.
