PoNW’s Favorites | Summer 2025
Summer brings staff favorite poetry collections from new and familiar writers.
Regaining Unconsciousness by Harryette Mullen (Aug., Graywolf) marks a triumphant return of a key authority on compressed, dazzling, and true poems. Traversing Chomsky, Wordsworth, or Rimbaud, Mullen’s new and dearly-anticipated poems remix and defy, including in the forms of screenplay, nursery rhyme on Bezos, or records of 2020 and 2021: the Covid vaccine, California wildfires, and the Atlanta spa shootings. The title poem narrates the aftermath of mass death: “we toast the drought with dry martinis. We play to lose and drink to get sober. Lasers restore blank looks misplaced in cracked mirrors. Doubtful clouds seek carefree rainbows.” Such refined syntax, linguistic play, and core confidence make clear that the world is made of language, and the language, of the world.
Lantana or, the indissoluble exhalation by bruno darío, translated by Kit Schluter (June, Ugly Duckling), is a testament to what translation can be and make: radical friendship, movable monument, and conversation across and between languages. Three poetry collections from the Mexican writer are bound into one collection and presented in both languages—refreshingly, not a page-by-page bilingual edition that so often suggests some kind of equivalence, but the English and Spanish versions bound together, as writer and translator are here. An introductory note memorializes the way writing related to death for darío, who died of brain cancer at 29 three years ago. So, too, do his astounding poems across all three volumes, from “he said he would write some beautiful verses…who knows if it was enough to save him” to “there’s a pen stuck in my brain” and “Do you claim to place your trust in tomorrow, / on which your duties and loves depend?”
Resting Bitch Face by Taylor Byas (Aug., Soft Skull) wonders not about the owner of the gaze but about the experience of the gazed on, the Black women watched, the places changed, the technology that makes possible that “my body develops apart from me.” There looms the threat of what men see—those who want something, those who laugh at a startle, not only while waiting for an Uber after a date, but also in classic paintings, sculptures, and the public spaces that house them. The sophomore collection engrossingly narrates the dangers and pleasures of seeing life like a movie, a mirror of estrangement.
Rooms for the Dead and the Not Yet by Rhoni Blankenhorn (July, Trio House) is a delicate and desirous book-length haunting in which the light is always fading, the regret misplaced, and the art alive. “Some memories return crudely, / as if drawn by a child,” reads one poem, but the book inverts this, each experience recreated with meticulous clarity, made of almost photo-realistically clean lines. The lonely child is often betrayed by adults (laughing or hitting), their renditions perhaps crude from a kind of narrative reprisal. The deaths of many, including a mother, father, and friend named Ginny, live out in conduits and markers of the living; voicemails, plates bridges, rocks can ghost, as well as the body and its holes and surprises. In Blankenhorn’s sure world, death and imperialism are made less final and more complicated, more bodily: “Is burial a very serious form of assimilation?” The Trio Award winner Rooms joins includes the impressive and echoing Coachella Elegy by Christian Gullette and the marvelously innovative Unceded Land by Issam Zineh. The collection is also released alongside The Grace of Black Mothers by Martheaus Perkins (July, Trio House), which redefines family’s scope with memorable poems in the form of lists, scenes, captions, and marginalia.
Spanning rural Kentucky and Greek mythology, accomplished debut End of Empire by Marissa Davis (July, Penguin Poets) begins at the ends. Only in the fragmentation of language at every point (syllable, thought, place) and by any means (en dash, line break, blank space, brackets) can the landscapes of the collection (environmental disaster, plant life, Blackness, the Bible) become real: “the / star / lings mur / mur // in a para / noid lang / uage.” After the flood comes the sun, these poems weathered by the relief and withering.
In Agrippina the Younger by Diana Arterian (June, Curbstone), death has steps and time is but one mold. The grand and beguiling collection both receives and resists the epic stylistic as it traces Agrippina as person, figure, and remainder. With curious devotion and meticulous line breaks, the conditions of her time and the poet’s overlap and the story of erasure comes alive. The hope of meaning in the past, so concentrated in a person, is delicate and changing as the project seems to question itself: “How to engage with a place, with what you can’t build upon? What use of it? Perhaps it is all an uninspired metaphor for what I am up to—trying to dig through the palimpsest of time, holding different artifacts up to the light to discern their use.” No detail is wasted in Arterian’s eye and no use is impossible; the past echoes into the present and future in eerie, bodily ways. One poem ends “I don’t want to imagine anymore” as the work of wondering shifts to acts of realizations and the speaker, so often looking and asking, turns to Agrippina and herself each as indivisible wholes.
—Edited by Nanya Jhingran and Cindy Ok