Every year I set out to read as widely as the publishing calendar allows, and 2025 was a year of genuine abundance — award-winning career retrospectives, startling debuts, and a handful of books so good they change what you think poetry can do. What follows is my selection of the collections that mattered most: not a comprehensive survey, but a considered list of books worth your time and attention.
The list draws on collections reviewed or read across 2025, with a bias toward books that are formally ambitious, emotionally serious, and genuinely rewarding to read more than once. If you're looking for our in-depth reviews of individual titles, see our Reviews section.
The National Book Award for Poetry went to Patricia Smith's career-spanning collection, and the decision was right. Smith — poet, performer, four-time National Poetry Slam champion — brings together decades of work into a single volume that amplifies neglected voices through what can only be called boundless language. Danez Smith has called her "the greatest living poet," and this collection makes that claim feel not hyperbolic but simply accurate. This is the year's essential book.
The US Poet Laureate's new collection arrives with the patient exactness that has made Sze one of the most essential poets working in English. Moving through silence, the natural world, and the processes of perception, Into the Hush asks what it means to look carefully enough at the world — and what that attention reveals. Read our full review here.
The Pulitzer Prize-winner returns with a book that asks — with rangy curiosity, sharp humor, and unflinching self-scrutiny — whether poetry can still mean anything. The answer it arrives at, unexpectedly and movingly, is yes. Keats haunts its pages as ghost, lover, and rival. One of the most important books of the year from one of American poetry's most original voices. Read our full review here.
Twelve years between collections is a long time. Mullen returns with eleven sections of formally inventive, politically alive poems that address climate change, corporate greed, and collective complacency — with such playfulness and wit that the alarm never becomes mere hectoring. This is political poetry that remains, above all, poetry. Read our full review here.
Kevin Young's deeply elegiac new collection moves through personal grief, collective memory, and American history. Four sections travel from meditations on the moon and birds through Young's Louisiana roots to a Dante-inspired descent into the underworld. Through rich, musical lines, Young blends lyricism and existential inquiry into something that might be the most fully realized work of his career. A book to read slowly, in silence.
The most striking debut of 2025. Lin draws from her experience as an undocumented person to reimagine her parents' journey from China to Brazil to the United States, and to excavate a childhood shaped by Christian fundamentalism and displacement. The confessional mode is used here with real intelligence — the poems earn their intimacy. A debut of unusual authority and formal confidence.
Fearless, revelatory, and magnetically charged — Dimitrov's new collection has been embraced by critics and readers alike as one of the year's most talked-about books. The poems are candid and intimate in the way that Frank O'Hara's were: fully committed to the specific moment, the named person, the texture of actual life. A necessary book from one of contemporary poetry's most distinctive voices.
Calvocoressi's exuberant new collection takes on desire, change, and adaptation — meditating on aging, death, grief, joy, and gender with the kind of joyful intensity that makes even the darkest subjects feel inhabited rather than merely visited. A finalist for the National Book Award, and one of the most fully alive collections of the year.
Where to start if you're new to contemporary poetry
If you're picking up a poetry collection for the first time, or returning after a long absence, the question of where to begin matters. My recommendation: start with either Patricia Smith's The Intentions of Thunder — its narrative range and emotional directness make it unusually accessible — or Esther Lin's Cold Thief Place, which tells a story and tells it beautifully.
If you want to understand the traditions these writers are working in and against, our Learn library covers the movements and poets that shaped contemporary American poetry: confessional poetry, the New York School, Imagism, and more.
The best poetry of 2025 shares one quality: it refuses comfort. It asks readers to stay with difficulty, with loss, with complexity — and rewards that staying with something that feels, finally, like truth.
We update this list annually. If you're a poet, press, or reader with a recommendation for next year's list, write to us at admin@inkandribbon.org. And if you write or publish poetry, consider submitting to the LemonLight Prize — our annual award for a single outstanding poem.
