Reading and writing poetry allows us to be stimulated both intellectually and emotionally. The ways in which language can bend, twist and bounce is most evident in poetry, where there are no rules to follow. 2025 has been a landmark year for poetry collections, with both debuts and known voices producing excellent creative work. Here is a list of poetry collections released this year that you must get on your hands on.
Dead Girl Cameo by M. Mick Powell
Dead Girl Cameo: A Love Song in Poems is a poetry collection described as "docupoetry," a form that blends existing material with the poet’s own words, much like found footage in film. In this work, Powell creates a love letter to Black musicians whose legacies endure far beyond their tragically short lives. Drawing on interviews with Tammi Terrell, Minnie Ripperton, and others, the poems form a textured collage where archival voices meet lyrical reflection. The collection is deeply personal to Powell, yet it resonates with readers through a shared parasocial connection to these powerful women.
Let The Moon Wobble by Ally Ang
Let the Moon Wobble is the debut poetry collection from Ally Ang, an Asian, Queer writer. Ang’s poems gleam with queer pleasure and imagine a future where the freaks and bottom-feeders take center stage. The title comes from the opening line of the first poem, drawing on the lunar phenomenon of ‘moon wobble’ to evoke a queerness that is messy, off-kilter, and ungovernable. In these poems, Ang embraces the wildness of both nature and self, balancing irreverent joy with sharp critiques of pinkwashing and rainbow capitalism.
Pink Dust by Ron Padgett
Pink Dust is a poetry collection that lingers in the spaces between memory and imagination, tracing the fragments that grief, desire, and tenderness leave behind. Padgett is a mastermind. His poems are detached and operate under an illogical logic, yet they hold together with a kind of glue.
What the Deep Water Knows by Miranda Cowley Heller
In this collection, the writing is long and winding, imbued with sensory detail and emotional nuance. Settings come alive with startling clarity, and the sea, in particular, emerges as a living, breathing force that shapes and shadows the collection. What the Deep Water Knows is both intimate and expansive, a meditation on what we choose to remember and what we can never quite let go.
The Space Between Men by Mia S Willis
These piercing, surprising poems look to familial history, rituals of faith, and the natural world to explore how the intersecting cultures of Blackness and queerness relate to each other. As the collection evolves, the reader is challenged and empowered to seek expansiveness in spaces that have not previously been excavated, reckon with the complexities of interpersonal relationships, and explore memory as a catalyst for self-determination.
When the Horses by Mary Helen Callier
When the Horses is Mary Helen Callier’s award-winning debut, a collection that explores the imaginative landscapes of childhood through poems rooted in the uncanny beauty of the American South. Callier delves into memory not as a fixed record but as a theater, echoing Walter Benjamin’s idea that memory is a stage where fragments of the past flicker in and out of focus.
Words Neeraja Srinivasan
Date 12-9-2025