2025 in reading (playing Yesterday)

My eldest child embroidered their way through this hard year, so for Christmas they gave me some of my favorite poetic lines on a little panel of violet cloth. They’re from Dickinson’s “Let Us play Yesterday.” “The o’s kill me,” Madeleine remarked about the difficulty of embroidering round letters. This detail seems poetic in its own way. Rhetorical apostrophe–address to someone or something absent or inanimate, sometimes marked by the letter O–can seem, as Jonathan Culler wrote, “embarrassing” and “pretentious” because it marks “invested passion,” an emotional intensity that can make readers and listeners feel awkward about listening in. (You can read his 1977 article “Apostrophe” on JSTOR–it’s worthwhile as well as clearly written, even if you’re not generally a fan of criticism and theory.) Apostrophe is also, he writes, “a fundamental gesture of lyric poetry.” It “makes its point by troping not on the meaning of a word but on the circuit or situation of communication itself.” It presumes to invoke something or someone Other.

This puzzle of a poem by Dickinson apostrophizes someone (lover, friend, reader, god?) through second person pronouns; takes a left turn through politics; and ends in what’s certainly a species of prayer, apostrophizing “God.” The term from “Let Us play Yesterday” that I love most, “Egg-life,” comes to suggest, through a digressive meander of stanzas, imprisonment, perhaps slavery specifically as well as metaphorical captivity in nineteenth-century womanhood, silence, and other states of unfreedom. I’ve nonetheless persisted in taking “Egg-life” personally. I’m always falling out of reserve’s shell into writing what troubles me. I usually feel like a baby bird even at work I’ve been practicing for most of my life, weak from ignorance though ready to squawk. That’s one of poetry’s best qualities, after all. No one can “master” it. Hallelujah!

Another of literature’s virtues: it reaches out to forge connections between people far from each other in time, geography, experience, and temperament–and thank goodness. You can read about some of the long-distance literary connections I made through reading this year at the Aqueduct Press blog, but I’ve also been reading a lot since then, so the list below rounds out the books I finished in 2025 (I’m in the middle of three other books now). You’ll see much more genre than so-called literary fiction, plus my document is heavy on women writers, both of which trends make me typical, according to this year’s US library stats. Many queer writers, too. The poetry collections largely came via festivals and series I participated in while reading from Mycocosmic, which is why my contemporary verse consumption really starts in June, as the tour’s first intensity ebbed–though I notice I haven’t even got to the 2025 AWP and Asheville festival piles yet. Soon! I’m happy to be deep in reading season with a wealth of books on hand.

Another happy thing: a two-way conversation from early summer has been posted on The Mushroom Hour. That one was wild and fun, as talking to mushroom people tends to be.

May the new year bring us all lots of good reading, maybe even sometimes cheer in the news. Mamdani will be enlightening to watch, I think. For the moment, drumroll please, with one explanation:

*The asterisks aren’t favorites–I don’t finish anything I don’t like, although I have mixed feelings about some of the novels below. I just want to mark for myself what’s very contemporary, published in the last year or two. You’ll see I note, too, how I learned of or acquired each book–or simply why I read or reread it–because I also find that interesting to track.

POETRY (51)

• 1/28 H.D., Sea Garden (reread for class)
• 2/2 Eliot, Prufrock and Other Observations (reread for class)
• 2/5 Eliot, The Waste Land (reread for class)
• 2/10 Jones, Television Fathers* (reread for class)
• 3/7 Moore, Complete Poems (reread for class)
• 3/15 Aylor, Close Red Water* (reread for class)
• 4/5 Hughes, Montage of a Dream Deferred (reread for class)
• 6/2 Martelli, Psychic Party Under the Bottle Tree* (reread for event)
• 6/5 Street, Just Labor* (fandom)
• 6/6 Lane, Called Back* (met at AWP)
• 6/11 Smith, In Inheritance of Drowning* (New Orleans poetry festival buy)
• 6/12 Castellano, All Is the Telling* (sent by publicist)
• 6/29 Howe, New & Selected Poems* (Pulitzer Prize)
• 7/2 Veach, Monster Galaxy* (fandom)
• 7/3 Cuello, Yours, Creature (fandom)
• 7/13 Washburn, What Is Given* (met at a reading)
• 7/15 Alexis, Beyond the Watershed* (Shenandoah poet’s debut)
• 7/18 Anderson, Sewell, Birds of North America (fandom)
• 7/19 Tobin, From the Distances of Sleep* (fandom)
• 7/27 Lehmann, The Sweating Sickness* (bought at festival)
• 8/1 Satterfield, The Badass Brontës (reread for research)
• 8/3 Moll, You Cannot Save Here* (bought when we read together)
• 8/4 Brookshire, Never Picked First For Playtime (bought after festival)
• 8/5 Leyva, The Opposite of Cruelty* (bought when we read together)
• 8/18 Winch, ed. Best American Poetry 2025* (contributor’s copy)
• 8/25 Saunier, Wheel* (read with her at a festival)
• 8/27 Gray, After the Operation* (met at a reading)
• 9/7 Crawford, Catch and Release* (met at a festival)
• 9/15 Rich, Blue Atlas* (fandom)
• 9/23 Hazen, The Sky Will Hold* (pre-pub, to blurb)
• 9/26 Martelli, My Tarantella (fandom)
• 10/18 Bombardier, What We Do (met at reading)
• 10/24 Nienow, If Nothing* (met at reading)
• 10/29 Igloria, Caulbearer* (fandom)
• 11/3 Goodtimes, Slow Rising Smoke (prep for reading with him)
• 11/3 Goodtimes, Looking South to Lone Cone “
• 11/5 Goodtimes, As If the World Really Mattered “
• 11/15 Igloria, Cassinetto, and Hassler, The Nature of Our Times* (in it!)
• 12/1 Fisher-Wirth and Street, eds., Attached to the Living World* (fandom)
• 12/8 Robinson, Fraudulent Offerings* (by a friend)
• 12/9 Bolina, English as a Second Language (heard him read)
• 12/10 Duhamel, Pink Lady* (fandom)
• 12/13 Wade, Quick Change Artist* (fandom)
• 12/13 Duhamel and Wade, 20 Ghazals for 2020* (fandom)
• 12/19 Beatty, Dragstripping* (fandom)
• 12/20 Potvin, Loosen (bought at festival)
• 12/21 Glass, Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms (bought at festival)
• 12/22 Oliver, The Alcestis Machine* (bought at festival)
• 12/22 Jackson, My Infinity* (bought at festival)
• 12/23 Yakovlev, One Night We Will No Longer Bear the Ocean* (bought at festival)
• 12/24 Jackson, The Absurd Man (bought at festival)

FICTION (55)

• 1/9 Bellairs, The Face in the Frost (gift from friend)
• 1/11 Bardugo, The Familiar* (fandom)
• 1/16 Kingfisher, Nettle and Bone (fandom)
• 1/25 Yokomizo, The Honjin Murders (gift)
• 1/28 Carr, The Hollow Man (reference in the previous book!)
• 1/31 Carr, To Wake the Dead (new fandom)
• 2/3 Carr, The Crooked Hinge (fandom)
• 2/6 Carr, The Black Spectacles (fandom)
• 2/9 Carr, The Problem of the Wire Cage (fandom)
• 2/14 Carr, The Man Who Could Not Shudder (fandom)
• 2/16 Carr, Till Death Do Us Part “
• 2/20 Carr, He Who Whispers “
• 2/25 Carr, In Spite of Thunder “
• 3/5 Carr, The Eight of Swords “
• 3/12 Alering, Smothermoss* (picked up at a bookstore)
• 3/16 Barker, Weaveworld (friend’s recommendation)
• 3/26 Lee, Electric Forest (NYT book review article)
• 3/30 Jones, The Angel of Indian Lake* (fandom)
• 4/12 Millet, Dinosaurs (fandom)
• 4/25 LeGuin, A Wizard of Earthsea (reread for class)
• 5/2 Novik, A Deadly Education (reread for class)
• 5/15 Bardugo, Ninth House (reread for class)
• 5/23 Ivey, Black Woods, Blue Sky* (fandom)
• 5/27 Christie, Complete Miss Marple Stories (audiobook for car trip)
• 6/4 Reid, Death on the Island (audiobook for car trip)
• 6/12 Muir, Gideon the Ninth (son’s recommendation)
• 6/18 King, Never Flinch* (fandom)
• 6/28 Fawcett, Emily Wilde’s Compendium of Lost Tales* (finishing trilogy)
• 7/3 Nicolay, Caterpillar* (fandom and friendship)
• 7/6 McTiernan, The Ruin (looking for well-reviewed Galway fiction)
• 7/8 McTiernan, The Scholar (next in series)
• 7/11 McTiernan, The Good Turn (let’s call it fandom now)
• 7/20 Murray, The Bee Sting (recommended by a friend)
• 7/26 Banville, The Lock-Up (online reviews)
• 7/28 Hill, The Woman In Black (no idea how it landed in my stack!)
• 8/4 McTiernan, What Happened to Nina? (fandom)
• 8/6 McTiernan, The Roommate (fandom)
• 8/7 McTiernan, The Sisters (fandom)
• 8/16 Ware, One by One (reviews)
• 8/18 Horowitz, Magpie Murders (reviews)
• 8/23 Ware, The Death of Mrs. Westaway (article about haunted house novels)
• 8/26 Collins, Sunrise on the Reaping* (daughter’s rec)
• 8/31 Ware, The It Girl (fandom by now)
• 9/15 Codega, Motheater (review)
• 9/21 McTiernan, The Unquiet Grave (audiobook for drive)
• 10/13 Callender, Infinity Alchemist (article on dark academia novels)
• 10/19 Thomas, Catherine House (article on dark academia novels)
• 10/24 Ware, The Woman in Cabin 10 (fandom)
• 11/3 Ware, The Turn of the Key (fandom)
• 11/11 Jones, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter* (fandom)
• 11/20 Ware, The Woman in Suite 11* (fandom)
• 12/8 Pullman, The Rose Field* (fandom)
• 12/12 Purvis, The Hounding* (Bookworld end of year list)
• 12/20 Tesh, The Incandescent* (same as above I think)
• 12/30 Theororidou, Sour Cherry* (Lit Hub Notable Indie Press Books)

NONFICTION/ HYBRID (8)

• 1/3 Moore, Termination* (met in Minneapolis)
• 1/17 Erdrich, Verb Animate* (fandom)
• 1/21 Nezhukumatathil, Bite by Bite* (fandom)
• 2/28 Pollan, Cooked (research)
• 8/5 Macfarlane, Is A River Alive?* (fandom)
• 10/25 Zeller, The Wonder of Mushrooms* (blurb)
• 12/11 Wade, Just An Ordinary Woman Breathing (fandom)
• 12/18 Tierney, looking at the tiny: mad lichen on the surfaces of reading (spotted on press website and was curious)