Twenty Transfeminine Poems from 2025 I Loved
my favorites from this year (so far)
I like poems & I like the ones in this newsletter in particular!
For the second year, The Transfeminine Review is running their Reader’s Choice Awards, celebrating transfeminine literature in every corner of publishing.
A few reasons I love best-of lists and awards and contests,1 despite the goofiness of pretending any kind of art can be reasonably measured and judged:
I like discovering work outside of my usual stomping grounds.
They’re fun to argue with.
They can spark useful conversations about what art is for & what makes it work.
Forced choices help you get to know yourself and others.2
And I like having my face rubbed in how wonderfully varied and inexplicable artistic taste is.3
The TFR awards are particularly fun because they bring together a wider range of work than you’ll see almost anywhere. The nature of marginalized publishing means that people find *all* kinds of ways to get *all* kinds of work into *all* kinds of readers’ hands.4 This year’s longlist for the biggest category, best fiction, contains
a heartfelt high-school sports story,
one of the most distressing works of horror I’ve ever read,
a tear-jerker fantasy about mother/daughter relationships and literary scholarship,
an installment in a very horny, very gay multi-author sci-fi universe where Greek myths pilot mecha,
and a collection anchored by a novella in lumberjack argot,
alongside right-down-the-middle realistic lit fic.5
And I’ve only read a third of them, but the ones I’ve read are *really good*!
TFR added a category for best individual poem this year, joining the category for best poetry collection. Such a smart idea — there are plenty of brilliant poetry books with no individual poems that land as hard out of context, and there are plenty of books with a few killer poems and a bunch of merely fine ones. And, especially in trans poetry, there’s a ton of interesting work coming out in little lit journals, or self-published zines, or chapbooks, by authors that may never do a traditional full-length.
I keep notes on poems that strike a chord when I read them,6 and narrowing down my picks to three for the TFR ballot was tough!7 I thought sharing my initial longlist might be a neat way to showcase a cross-section of transfeminine poetry from the year.8
I’ve of course read a tiny, tiny fraction of the year’s poetry! I’d love to hear your picks from the year in the comments. And if you’re a transfeminine poet, let us know about your best work from the year!
And if you’ve read any work (poetry or otherwise) by transfeminine authors from this year that you’ve loved, go vote for it! The tallies are public, so every vote helps others discover the work you enjoyed & encourages its author. Don’t be intimidated by the billion categories, very few ballots are fully filled-out.
My favorite transfeminine poems from this year, in no particular order:
(I won’t give individual content notes for these; many do treat difficult or explicit topics.)
I’ve long admired Allison Parrish’s work in… process poetry? computationally-assisted literature? the poetics of algorithms? You may know her from her early-Twitter-famous Everyword bot that posted each English word between 2007 and 2014. Her book-length… essay? fortune? definitely probably poem? Two of Pentacles is her richest work yet. Also: every printing of it is different. Available for purchase here & check out some notes on its construction here.
Kay Gabriel’s long poem “Perverts” anchors her book of the same name. It’s a series of retellings of her friends’ dreams, from which a tender messy portrait of community & care emerges. From Nightboat.
Bianca Rae Messinger’s “pleasureis” opens her collection pleasureis amiracle and lays out its argument: the transcendence that can be found in art and sex requires a particular kind of labor and cooperation; it happens together, between us. A work song for lifting one another out of the pit. Also from Nightboat.
And that must mean sometimes art and sex is not transcendent. Sometimes “My orgasm is juicy and boring. I think of CVS.” Jade Kleiner’s “Sixty One Weeks, Three Days After The Concussion.” Online in manywor(l)ds #10, here.
That’s because, like, duh, art and sex are about power. There’s no shortage of writing about the erotic machinery that powers capitalism & fascism, but the girls are really doing something special with the guro and the mechsploitation. Esther Alter reports on the petrokink choking us all in “Frack Me.” In Rose Books Reader #1. Audio online here.
Since we’re on the NSFW train already, Nel Gosh’s zines are the poetic equivalent of sloppy drunken T4T hookups.9 “when i die from being old (f*ck you, / fascists) i will go to hot girl heaven.” “hot girl heaven” opens this 12-page zine.
Despite its name, “Eros” by Paul Tran is not quite in this vein. This poem concentrates a lot of what I loved in their collection All the Flowers Kneeling: sound play that seems clever on first read and rich with meaning subsequently; deep moral searching nested within reckoning with how little we control. Online at Poem-a-Day.
I adore the sheer density of a Jackie Sabbagh piece — she somehow tucks novels into sonnets,10 spinning effortlessly across tones and voices and degrees of realism. “Taking a Flight with a Handsome Stranger” online at Gulf Coast.
Jennessa Hester has been publishing a series of poems on her experience in Boy Scouting — for me like her, it was the setting for a lot of transmisogynistic violence, despite no one involved having a conceptual framework for that. I find many of the poems hit me too hard for me to appreciate the craft.11 But “Trogdor Walks Into a Scout Meeting” covers the same territory while being hilarious.12 Online at Strange Horizons.
Pre-transition childhood is also the focus of Winona Meridian Marks’ hybrid poem-essay “Sackcloth Ashes Opals Pearls,” which explores how narrative opens possibilities and forecloses them, the way an audience for our life changes it. An urgent argument for trans literature in the face of KOSA, payment processor discrimination, and all the other censorship efforts, and a strong closing piece for Lilac Peril’s TABOO anthology, available here.
Nora Hikari’s collection Still My Father’s Son is the most metal poetry I read this year. Not in the badass sense but in the relentless present tense of heavy metal, its theme of refusing to blame a wound that hasn’t closed for being open, its leverage of violent religious imagery against religious violence.13 “Notes on a Poem” (“1. I am swallowing a poem praying that it will kill you”) and “The End of Time”14 (“We have read pain enough. / Written it back into our native tongues.”) left me reeling. From Sundress.
If Still My Father’s Son is metal, Fourteen Poems is the foremost publisher of sweet queer shoegaze. Their eponymous anthology pamphlets are great samplers of relatable, deeply felt work. Issue #17 contains “Pro/Test 07/11/24” from Amy Jo Philip which beautifully captures a sense of sacred purpose that can arise during direct action. From Fourteen Poems.15
Fourteen Poems also published an anthology of “young”16 queer Latin American poetry this year, as Hemisferio Cuir. The translations are a little too word-by-word, which has a homogenizing effect for someone like me who’s leaning on the English side of the page, but it’s a beautifully wide-ranging collection. I was swallowed up by Flor Bárcenas Feria’s “El agua de los sueños” (“La infancia hala como la criatura blanca / ahogada en el centro del río.”). From Fourteen Poems.17
jzl jmz’ Local Woman snuck up on me. Her earlier Mannish Tongues had a bunch of good music but often felt a little cold, a little obvious to me. Local Woman reads like a totally different poet, technically brilliant with a heart on fire. “Who Lived Happily Before the War?”18 and “Obligation #15 (TRANSPOSE)” were favorites from the collection. From Nightboat.
Danez Smith’s “Dear Time,” is a sweet scared world-wise love poem that is so good that it somehow gets away with the phrase “you, time, you cancel all grandmas.” Online here.
The first issue of NYC mag Picnic19 has an aching sequence on motherhood by Cat Fitzpatrick, from her forthcoming book The Dinner Party. Its next-to-last poem, “Rise Again,” is perfect. Pay what you want for Picnic #1 here.
Sara, or I lived my life as a cloud that followed overhead, from Never Angeline Nørth, (available here) is my favorite book from a year with a bunch of good books. I want to memorize it. It’s like The Little Prince had a baby with the glimpse of infinity I got from watching the Philip Glass Sesame Street circle animation, but for grownups. It has a heart that is so so so too big.20 It’s not laid out like a conventional poetry collection, but it mostly breaks into independent segments that can be read as separate poems. Two of my favorites involve Sara leaving her world entirely: “[Sara came upon a seashell covered with ants.]” and “[Sara met Time in a pretty void.]" Here they are:
Sara came upon a seashell covered with ants. Something unseen touched her face.
Who was that? said Sara.
No response came. Sara looked at the shell more closely. The ants began to move onto her finger as she touched it. Something unseen brushed against her hair.
Ok, who was that? said Sara.
Again, there was no response. Sara looked around and saw nothing. She looked at her hand and the ants crawling up onto it, exploring the wrinkles of her skin. Something unseen made her think they were smoothing it out, like a sheet over a bed, like she would be young again.
Who was that? Sara said.
A square-shaped gap opened in the sky above her. Beyond was pure light, pure dark, pure nothing, pure everything.
Seriously, who was that?
The ants moved farther up her arm. Sara kept still. The seashell disappeared. The landscape dissolved. Sara was suspended in void, outside of time. The ants covered her whole body. Sara disappeared, and all that was left was a shell of ants, perfectly Sara-shaped.
Who was that?
and:
Sara met Time in a pretty void.
This is the prettiest void I have ever seen, said Time.
It’s okay, said Sara.
Since we are here alone together, I would like to tell you I am sorry, said Time.
For what? said Sara.
There was a sound like shaking a bag of small shells and the smell of burnt anise. Spiders came from above.
Oh no, said Time, eyes welling. You don’t know yet. You don’t even know.
Links for these poems, summarized:
Poems you can check out online: Kleiner, Alter, Tran, Sabbagh, Hester, Smith, Fitzpatrick.
Books/zines that contain these poems, which you can buy to support trans art and trans people: Parrish, Gabriel, Messinger, Gosh, Marks, Hikari, Philip, Bárcenas Feria, jmz, Nørth.
Also, I wrote some things!
I published a bunch of things this year! Some highlights:
A short story about two of the feminine archetypes that have shaped me, namely Margaret Atwood and She-Hulk, in HAD: “2025.01.06 (mon), 3p-4p”
Also in HAD, a poem imagining the theodicy of a great PBS comforter: “Bob Ross Defends the Invention of Death”
A strict pantoum about voices and other wriggly things, and the mysteries of how our hungers change us, in Voicemail Poems: “When I Try to Verify Why They Carpet Driveways After the Rain, Google Keeps Feeding Me Distressingly Hot Factoids About Hermaphroditic Earthworm Sex”
Zone 3 generously gave its annual poetry award to “Seven of the Bonus Stages of Grief”
I write disproportionately often about being gay for the moon, but Fifth Wheel Press published a rare poem of mine about being gay for some other planet’s moon: “the trouble with holding”
Go forth & read some trans poetry and talk with me about it and vote in the TFR awards!
And then fight like hell together for our survival and our freedom. Stay in it, loves.
~Callie
I get a very special frisson from meta-lists, like LitHub’s ranking of the year’s books by how many best-of-the-year lists they appear on
sort of in the same way “would you rather have teeth for elbows or elbows for teeth” is a great conversation opener at parties
it’s reassuring that I can’t possibly write something everybody thinks is good!
in contrast to a mainstream literary publishing world dominated by the editorial tastes of a vanishingly small number of rich New Yorkers who apparently think making bad choices about who to sleep with is the most interesting thing a character can do?
can it actually be right-down-the-middle if it contains realistic depictions of trans women?
next to my spreadsheets for crushes and teeth-brushing
my picks for poetry full-length were a little easier for me to settle on: jzl jmz’ Local Woman, Kay Gabriel’s Perverts, and Never Angeline North’s Sara, or, I lived my life as a cloud that followed overhead stood out - lots of other books with good poems in them, but these were strong, coherent projects that particularly moved me
I have a zillion caveats I want to share! I didn’t read with a particular intention of surveying the transfeminine poetry landscape! I’m drawing from an unrepresentative selection of work, heavily biased by word of mouth & proximity to my friends and Bluesky follows. This list is not “the best transfeminine poems of 2025,” this is “my favorite transfeminine poems from 2025 that I happened to catch before the end of the year.”
Also, of course, I loved many poems this year that weren’t by transfeminine folks! And many where I have no idea about the author’s relationship to gender. Maybe in another newsletter?
complimentary
like, the lines are long, but not that long, and yeah, sometimes not actual sonnet-sonnets
I don’t totally understand what’s going on with this — I read lots of work about hard experiences, including hard experiences I share, and usually seem to metabolize it fine (or at least have a good understanding of how much I can bear on a given day), but something about these poems really messes me up
though you might have to have been Too Online in the early 2000s to fully appreciate it
though yeah, actually, it does go hard
until Dec 27th, they’re running a steep 60% discount with code SIXTY
many of the poets represented were born in the 70s! some are professors with a bunch of books out! occasionally in poetry young is redefined to mean a poet of any age without a full-length (Yale Series of Younger Poets, for example), but most of the poets in this collection have published!
also part of the 60% discount with code SIXTY running through Dec 27th
this has not much to do with poetry but I have weird feelings about Picnic because it includes a story by the woman whose before/after transition photo was the thing that taught me that I was HORRIFICALLY MISINFORMED about what medical transition after your early 20s was capable of doing, changing my life wildly for the better… it was terrifying to encounter the front cover of Picnic and type in the search bar and discover that a person who I stared at two pictures of for hours in disbelief, years ago, knowing nothing at all about, turns out to be an actual person with a last name who, like, has met people I have met and sometimes does things related to things I do. I think I imagined her photo was a gift from a parallel world with more magic in it that only rarely interacts with ours, like Helsinki. the story was good but has not yet induced a follow-up miracle
You can get more of a feel for whether it’s your jam, too, from the poems below and from this excerpt.
Thanks for sharing. The onion flower story im not understanding.