Hello, fellow travelers!
As of this morning, we all have just about eight weeks of reading to vote on the finalists of this year’s Hugo Awards—including the six finalist poems of this year’s 2025 Special Hugo Award for Best Poem category! Now, I can talk forever about each individual poem—they’re amazing, and each one is absolutely deserving of the honor of being nominated!
However, in lieu of conditioning your opinions with my own, our speculative poetry reading curriculum is going to make a minor detour. Let’s tackle the finalist list by putting some of these poems beside each other and asking meaningful questions about their themes and approaches in curious interconnecting ways.
Here’s one to start with: Some of these poems overlap in both their observations about pain and trauma, as well as lead those observations through fantasy imagery: specifically, the voices of gods and powerful unnamed forces of myth. What do those poems have to offer under closer watch?
Mari Ness’ “Ever Noir” is told from the perspective of an unidentified representative of the realm of fairy tales trading their services to those seeking to understand the stakes of their stories. Its persona’s pulp-detective tone underscores the curious theme at the heart of the poem, that the consistently tragic outcomes of many fairy tales seem to be as grim as they are mysterious, only searching for someone to unravel the reasons why:
Why the tower. Why the apple.
Why the slipper always breaks.
Why hate spirals around their skin.
What they did to deserve this.
Sadly, the persona can only offer their work:
Me, I got no answers. It ain’t my thing.
I’m no fairy godmother, no
youngest prince. I’ll hunt around,
I tell them, maybe even
dust for fingerprints. Find out
who’s behind this. Maybe.
“We Drink Lava” by Ai Jiang poses a very powerfully interesting image of gods who consume the amalgam of human suffering as literal molten liquid and let it take new shape within them, coming to terms with the meaning it can give them despite it being too bitter for those who made that pain itself.
It was clear why humans could not drink
lava like we, so unaccepting of their pasts,
so much fear for their futures, where we find
enjoyment experiencing both in the present.
Because to us, that is all that matters.
Angela Liu’s “there are no taxis for the dead” tells the story of someone’s lingering concerns for a loved one’s travel to and from the realm of those who have passed on, imagining a gloomy but vivid path on horseback as they return to their past home to be together. The persona expresses not only a kind of curiosity about the path itself, but also a sense of fearful longing about a future where this journey, or their meeting, will become less likely:
Each day
I forget you a little more
your shadow by the window like a
swath of birds taking flightI know
this is a necessary migration,
but I worryyou won’t find your way next year
Fortunately, their returned loved one reassures them by reminding them of one of the truths of this journey:
you tell me to remember
the horses
how even grazing on the night fieldthey always know their way home
Here are some questions to consider when reading, to help you get a better sense of your own impressions and what these poems may be reaching out to you to say:
- How does the imagery in these poems feel to me when I read? What about them is most vivid or impressive to me as I experience them?
- What about their expressions of trauma, misfortune, or loss sticks with me most strongly?
- How do these poems possibly relate to each other or to the other poems I’ve read?
- Each poem’s stanzas and lines flow in vastly different ways—how do each of them make me feel while reading them? Do they make the lines look interesting as I read them silently? Do they flow into each other in fascinating ways when read aloud?
- What lines are sticking out to me so far? What about them resonates with me so strongly?
This also equips you to ask a similar question about the entire ballot that may be useful: What throughlines do you see between all of the finalists? What do you think they are all in conversation about, or what differences do you see in their approaches to their own individual stories? Of course each poem is different, but by watching them as a whole, you may also discover something intriguing about the poems that truly speaks to you!
Working your way patiently through these poems by asking questions like this will be helpful as you put them in their ranking orders for your ballots closer to the voting deadline! Even if the thing you are thinking or feeling right now feels intensely personal, a bit unserious, or distant, or if you are still trying to figure out how you feel about these poems, asking more questions and being truly curious as you read are ways through those lines and directly toward your best assessments of them.
Until then, may tomorrow and your good days always rhyme!
Brandon O’Brien is a writer, performance poet, teaching artist, and tabletop game designer from Trinidad and Tobago. His work has been shortlisted for the 2014 and 2015 Small Axe Literary Competitions and the 2020 Ignyte Award for best in speculative poetry, and has been published in many genre magazines and collections. He is the former poetry editor of FIYAH. His debut poetry collection, Can You Sign My Tentacle?, available from Interstellar Flight Press, is the winner of the 2022 Elgin Award. He is the poet laureate for Seattle Worldcon 2025, and the first poet laureate of any Worldcon.