Audre Lorde said it best: “Poetry is not a luxury.” It stands behind no closed door nor price tag but poetry does require the time and space for emergence. How does one make time and space for poetry to exist within their life?

Welcome to 2025, where AI runs the literary world, poets fight back with phoenix metaphors, and even your horoscope can’t escape algorithmic judgment. Let the stars—and GPT-9—guide you through a year of verse, revisions, and cosmic absurdity. Who knows? Maybe Saturn’s retrograde will finally explain why Submittable hates you.

Ahh, the fresh scent of a new year— it smells like warm mud in a region that should be blanketed with snow. There’s much to wonder about as we step into 2025, and a curious public continues to ask Google all the biggest questions. Here are five of the major topics on our collective minds, per Google Trends.

It was those tough Italian kids with the pretty names--DiOrio, DelVecchio, Policarpio--who taught me to love poetry. If I told any one of them he had a pretty anything, I’d get a metaphor for my trouble: a knuckle sandwich; a brand new asshole; my ass kicked into next week.

Poetry is trash, the discarded bits and pieces of what once was…those faded memories you remember each time you see a bag of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos or an empty tube of cherry lip gloss or that goofy AF condom package that make you cringe (why?).

Garbage is a portal for poetic exploration.

Gregory Gonzalez writes: “Weighing a word is the most important and most difficult function for a writer. Even more so for a poet. Meter dictates rhyme, and reason, while free verse holds a certain flow; an essence from the soul of the author, put in the narration like living magic into a world once believed to have none.”

Poetry is trash, the discarded bits and pieces of what once was…those faded memories you remember each time you see a bag of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos or an empty tube of cherry lip gloss or that goofy AF condom package that make you cringe (why?).

Garbage is a portal for poetic exploration.