Hugo Awards 2026: Best Poem

I am glad that successive Worldcons have decided to make Best Poem a permanent category. Poetry is probably the oldest literary genre, and limiting the Hugo award to prose meant missing out. Speculative or fantastic poetry is difficult, because a work has to be both: good poetry and something beyond the mundane, whether science fiction, fantasy or myth. It’s quite a challenge for both readers and writers. Will the audience get what the author was aiming for within the limited space of the poem? Does a work need to be a poem to convey what the author wants? Recognizing when this is well done can only improve poetry’s standing within the community of people who care about the Hugos, and maybe it can even help build a larger cadre of practitioners, strengthening the form.

Here are my brief notes on this year’s finalists, in ascending order of preference.

“Landing: Seattle” by Brandon O’Brien was presented at and for the opening ceremony of the Seattle Worldcon in 2025. Occasional poetry is a tough nut to crack; even Robert Frost fell back on something he had previously written when the sun got in his eyes on that January day in 1961. I wouldn’t say occasional poetry shouldn’t exist — it is there to heighten the occasion, and it can perform that role most admirably. It seldom outlives the occasion for which it was composed, and “Landing: Seattle” gives an example of why.

“The Mourning Robot” by Angela Liu opens with an arresting couple of lines: “They came with machetes/asked if we knew the way to Wonderland.” Tell me more! But the poem veers off in a more imagist direction, giving readers more fragments, a “they” and a “we” with little to attach them to, charged words and a final turn. I suppose it’s meant to be a mood, but it never came together enough for me. This poem illustrates some of the things that make speculative poetry so difficult. If it’s short, it runs the risk that readers don’t have enough to follow the author’s ideas and intentions. If it’s long, it can make readers wonder why it isn’t a prose story instead. Maybe there are references that I missed, that would have made “The Mourning Robot” cohere more. Or maybe Liu is just aiming for a feeling, a vibe, a combination of machine and mourning, with menace from that first line. Unfortunately, I couldn’t tell, and so we went past each other, the poet and I.

“Care for Lightning” by Mari Ness is another one that went past me. The first stanza is full of what might be allusions, “heavenly snakes/to slide slither into that hand-hewn crib,” “she sent/those stinging insects against that cow,” “turned that one girl into a bear,” “chained/that one dude to a fiery wheel.” Alas, I did not recognize any of them, and without that knowledge to hold the poem together, I am not sure who “she,” the subject of the poem, might be. Nor could I figure out who the speaker might be, whether they are meant to be a specific figure from mythology, or a more generalized narrator. The speaker uses modern diction — “Bitch got stuff done,” “Lightning hits/a bit different now” — in a mythical setting; I expect that Ness had some specific intent with the contrast, but I couldn’t really parse it either.

“How to Become a Sea Witch” by Theodora Goss does, as they say, what it says on the tin. It is a poetic rendering of how someone — I presume a human person, but what fun this poem might be if the “you” being addressed were not human at all! — becomes a sea witch. “You start by wading,/then practicing how to dive/under the waves” gradually going out further and further, deeper and deeper, holding your breath longer and longer. These exercises lead to physical transformation, “then you know/it’s time to go, to find/your own lonely beach/with its own cavern.” And then the witchery begins! Goss describes many things that a sea witch may wish to do, praising the richness of that life. Transformation complete, the poem comes to an end. It evokes an interesting experience, and invites a reader to try on the changes, the new perspective, the power of sea witchiness. It’s obviously much more mythical than science-fictional, but that’s fine.

“Hex Supply Customer Support Log” by Elis Montgomery chronicles a feature of contemporary life — a chat with customer support — and transforms it multiple times. Initially, the chat is about supplies for spells “two pounds of bloodied kelp/some teeth and frog antiques” that have been ordered but not delivered. The poem also starts in four-line stanzas with alternating end rhymes, an extremely traditional form with up-to-date and fantastical content. Plus it’s funny! That’s an underrated virtue in poetry that isn’t presented as light verse. Then the next transformation comes as the human complainant begins to wonder whether they are chatting with a bot. Then the company representative breaks the stanza form; that pleased me to no end. Montgomery shows why she had taken the form in the first place, then she breaks it for a reason, and then she brings it back for yet another. Then more mysterious things happen, and the poem takes further turns. Not all poems have to carry a great weight, and “Hex Supply” shows why.

“The World to Come” by Jennifer Hudak does carry a greater weight, bears it well and not too heavily. It tells of the day of resurrection, from a specifically Jewish perspective, from the point of view of someone experiencing the return. What is Jerusalem, to which they are called? What is “olam ha-ba:/the world to come, our birthright, our home”? The speaker remembers being a little girl, learning about some of these things in Hebrew school but not really understanding. Hudak skips over the speaker’s life, however long it was. Hudak just writes that she welcomed death when it came, and that she resists the “callous call.” “I am a corpse who pines for pine, and/this world to come is no world of mine.” This is not a poem of questioning; it has a very definite point of view, but that perspective is at odds with how the resurrection and the afterlife are usually portrayed, and that may prompt a reader to new consideration of what they had previously considered self-evident. That’s a fine foray, and it gets my top vote.

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This is the eighth bit of Hugo-related writing I have done for 2026, including earlier reviews of works that became finalists. Doreen’s views on the Best Poem category are here.