Yesterday Today Tomorrow Forever

Recommended Books for November 2025

Author

Josh Cook
November 26, 2025

Hello Readers,

I stumbled into another themed issue! I think this might actually be the first time I've done all poetry, which given the amount of it I read, is kinda surprising. I actually reviewed poetry for a long time, mostly for Bookslut (RIP) and the Rumpus but even a few times for actual money at the Los Angeles Review of Books. This poetry issue happened because I wanted to hype the Today book, which made me think of the Yesterday book. (Don’t you love how every book suggests their own syllabus, one that grows as you ask questions, seek answers, and notice connections. Maybe someday we’ll have an education system where that type of organic, associative, connection based syllabus is the norm.) I had something else for my Forever book, but a stack of poetry galleys in my mail box at work prompted my Tomorrow and at that point, I figured it’d almost be weird not to round things out with more poetry. And I don’t think I’ve ever told you how much I love Merwin, so here we are.

So here are, four collections of poetry. If you’re into it great. If you’re not, well, I actually think it’s cool that people are into different things and that we should celebrate and support all of those differences rather than always trying to convert people or funnel them or whatever.

Happy reading!

Josh

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YESTERDAY

Voyage of the Sable Venus by Robin Coste Lewis

How do we build a better world from all this shit we inherited? How do we tell the difference between the utterly unredeemable toxic waste of society and the waste that can be converted into compost that helps grow something better? What must be rejected, what can be repurposed, what can be salvaged? I have never been a “burn it all down,” guy, partly because I think there is a lot worth saving and partly because I think the fires would mostly burn the innocent, so I can’t avoid the question “OK, so what do we do with all of this <gestures vaguely> shit?”

Coste Lewis believes in the ability of art, at least, to render some of the toxicity in the past into useable material for a more just present and future. The long title poem of the collection is built entirely from the titles of artworks that feature or comment on the Black female form in Western art. There’s a way to look at her poem as an act of reparative reading of those pieces an assertion that, as long as there is a human present in the work there is a possible humanist reading of it no matter what the author may have intended. Essentially, no amount of racist ideology or propaganda can ever fully erase the human depicted in their art and images no matter how that person is depicted or what is intended by the depiction.

Even though the “Sable Venus,” is constructed as a character, I wonder if the poem is also an act of self-making for Coste Lewis, not in the sense that I believe she sees herself as the Sable Venus, but that, as a Black woman, as a person who has a presence of some kind in these works of art, she is able to essentially create source material for her own sense of self. As I’m pretty sure I’ve written about before in this newsletter, works of literature tend to be driven by questions the authors ask of themselves, and we’re just lucky that literature allows us into the process of answering them.

TODAY

Algarabia: The Song of Cenex, Natural Son of the Isle of Alarabiyya by Roque Raquel Salas Rivera

I don’t think there’s any doubt that Algarabia is an intentional and radical act of self-making. Of course, in this, Salas Rivera is not limited to the creation of a single entity (Cenex), but through that process of self-making, also engages in place-making and myth-making. It is a big, complicated, ambitious project featuring multiple voices, multiple characters, transformations, text going in atypical directions, and more. I wish I could say more but I’ve only just scratched the surface and this is definitely a book one needs to dive into and inhabit for awhile.

Also, kudos to Graywolf for publishing a bilingual edition. It seems like an obvious choice to me, given the kind of book it is, but a lot, maybe nearly all, other publishers would definitely have skipped that expense.

TOMORROW

Gravitation: Selected Poems by Milan Dezinsky translated by Nathan Fields

I do not hype enough university presses. Probably the biggest reason for this gap is just that I don’t get a ton of galleys from them, for whatever reason. (Well, beyond the more general Not Made of Time, thing) Maybe they don’t send as many out as the other small presses I’ve gotten to know or maybe I’m just not on their radar (though I used to have a pretty solid connection at Columbia University Press) because I haven’t done as much work with them. Regardless of the why, when I saw a stack of poetry galleys from the University of Pittsburg Press I saw an opportunity to rectify this lacuna, at least for one edition of the YTTF. (They had been addressed to the “Poetry Buyer” at Porter Square Books, which is not a person who exists, so they ended up with me who is at least a person known to read poetry.)

I’d never heard of Milan Dezinsky before, but his work reminded me of some other poets I enjoy, like Paul Muldoon or some of Andrei Codrescu’s more straight forward work. Maybe even a little Seamus Heaney, but, you know, drawing from the landscape of Czechia instead of Ireland. Many of Dezinsky’s poems have a little pop in them, or a hidden edge that shifts the tone and direction of the poem in interesting ways, without being too out there. (A place I often enjoy being.) This makes him accessible as a poet in the way some of, say, James Tate’s earlier work was, as well as an author in translation. And if you’ve also been neglecting your university presses, well, Gravitation is great for fixing that too.

FOREVER

Migration: New and Selected Poems by W.S. Merwin

Does anyone break a line like Merwin? The first Merwin I read was The Shadow of Sirius, which I picked up because I was in an indie bookstore that had an (at the time)…pretty pedestrian selection from what I could see while I was browsing, but, I was determined to buy something. (I don’t have much money, but I have enough to show a little support to my comrades.) Shadow of Sirius was the most interesting thing I found and that ended up being a really solid choice. It’s probably fair to say that my assessment of Merwin’s line-breaks is colored by a collection that is almost fanatically but brilliantly driven by that primal mechanism of poetry.

From there I went and got Migrations, Merwin’s National Book Award winning, definitive collection and got to discover his incredible range of tone and technique. At times he reads almost like Frost, other times more like Kunitz, sometimes Muldoon, and often like only himself.

(Going to break in for a second to argue that “selected” and “collected” books should not be eligible for the big prizes. It’s like greatest hits albums winning Grammys. Of course, a poetry collection drawn from decades of writing is going to be good, since you’ve got so much to choose from! Which is not to belittle the process of or person making the selections but just to note that it is much different skill from composition! Anyway.)

I’ve always enjoyed the idea of an “Emotional Support Dead White Guy.” I think it’s a playful way to chip away at the “of his time” argument that apologizes for the bad actions and beliefs of important people (men usually) from the past. I think it also has less baggage than the similar idea “problematic fav.” (Anthony Bourdain and Pete Seeger, if you’re curious.) Maybe we all should have an “Emotional Support Dead White Guy Poet,” as well. I don’t know if Merwin is my “Emotional Support Dead White Guy Poet,” but he’s a pretty solid choice.