Hugo Awards 2025: Best Poem

Continuing with our coverage of the 2025 Hugo Awards is my survey of the poetry finalists, a category that debuts this year as a trial balloon for inclusion in future WorldCons. Personally, I think it’s a great idea for an ongoing category, especially as it encourages writers to continue experimenting with form and, hopefully, discipline, while still telling amazing stories.

All this is exemplified in my personal favorite of this year’s nominees, Marie Brennan’s A War of Words. It was originally published in Strange Horizons, but has since been collected with several other of the author’s shorter works into The Atlas Of Anywhere. The poem works in capturing the rhythm of both battle and loss, with the necessary economy only underscoring the surprisingly universal theme. Frankly, I think it’s brilliant, and head and shoulders above the rest of its competition.

Which isn’t to say that the rest are at all bad! Angela Liu’s there are no taxis for the dead is much more imagist in its leanings, as it discusses grief and spectral homecomings. It is, perhaps, the most mainstream of these poems, as it reads easily as a literary metaphor of dealing with the loss of a loved one.

My third favorite was Oliver K. Langmead’s Calypso, a book that I’ve previously discussed at the link. This sci-fi novel in verse is the longest and probably most experimental of the nominees, spanning centuries of both in-universe time and our-universe pages. I felt that it had both pros and cons — the most pertinent of which being that I felt that some of its parts would have been better as just regular prose — but overall it was a worthy experiment and one I hope more authors will attempt.

Devan Barlow’s Your Visiting Dragon is a cozy urban fantasy of what to do should you find a (small) dragon in your home. It’s cute, with a mildly scientific tone, and like the dragons it describes, doesn’t outstay its welcome.

I also enjoyed Mari Ness’ Ever Noir, which takes the fairy tale tropes and filters them through the lens of a noir detective. I don’t think it quite communicates what it wants to, which I suppose translates into “I didn’t understand the ending enough to like it.” I do think that this would be a great springboard for a whole series of fairy tale-noir mashup novellas tho.

Finally, we have Ai Jiang’s We Drink Lava. I have yet to enjoy any of her works, tho I’m hoping that changes soon with A Palace On The Wind, a novella I have on my very long TBR. Honestly, I found this poem baffling. Even were I more familiar with the motifs, I thought the meter was off and the grammar unnecessarily bad. The vividness was nice, but the whole “puny mortals” theme was overworked, despite the cleverness of some of the wordplay.

Seattle WorldCon 2025 is in two weeks, and the Hugo winners will be announced then! In the meantime, feel free to browse through some of my favorite reads of 2025, and let me know how you feel about this category!