Welcome to this special guest-edited issue, featuring poetry recommendations by Angela Liu!
I fell in love with Angela’s short stories several years ago with a double-whammy of her amazing work— “The Time Traveler’s Cookbook” in Cast of Wonders, and “Imagine: Purple-Haired Girl Shooting Down the Moon” in Clarkesworld.
Her poetry can be found in Strange Horizons, Nightmare Magazine, Small Wonders, Uncanny Magazine, Heartlines Spec, and more. Her poem “there are no taxis for the dead” was a finalist for the inaugural Hugo Award for Best Poem in 2025. Her poem “An Interrogation About a Monster During Sleep Paralysis” won 3rd place in the 2023 Rhysling Awards. Her poem “The Mourning Robot” was a finalist for the inaugural Nebula Award for Best Poem and the Hugo Award for Best Poem in 2026. Her poem, “The Language of Fireflies” won the 2026 Ignyte Award for Best Speculative Poem.
Huge thanks to Angela for assembling this very cool list of poetry recs!!
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by Ridwan Fisasi in Strange Horizons
Enugu City, 2100
When the train rattled past the night,
something mysterious crawled into us.
Fisasi’s sci-fi poem of a futuristic Nigeria in the year 2100 deftly mixes real history with vivid cyberpunk vibes. I loved how they build an entire, lived-in world within the confines of a poem here—I could hear the train announcements, see the women negotiating the price of a robot, the lake and mango trees in the middle of the desert. With gorgeous, elegiac lines like “All around were floating streetlights & their companions / of loneliness,” there is a beautiful, lingering melancholic tone to all the images that stayed with me long after finishing the poem.
in april orion hangs up his belt like
by Kyra Jee in Orion’s Belt
he’s sick & lonely of being counted
on. accounted for. the camera a buckshot now
to the fine glass filigree of blood pressure
in april he wants to pick up & run forever
I love a modern take on old story and this one repositions Orion, the famous hunter of Greek mythology (for which the equally famous constellation is named) as an almost washed-up celebrity who just wants to be “good for something other than being seen” and maybe try out jet skiing. I also love a poem that effectively uses little to no punctuation, and this one does just that, creating a propulsive rhythm and flow throughout.
By Anna Drasko in HAD
soft skull of a man told me I have
soft teeth. My teeth, like the fuzzy piece of peach,
soft. Have you heard this? That even teeth can be
soft? Molars worn from carrying myth, slicing
I love a poem that can make you rethink the meaning of a word, and this poem uses variations of the word “soft” twenty-four times. You’ll be thinking about all the different “soft” things in your life by the end.
Single Mother and Coyote Fathers
by Angel Leal in Small Wonders
Mother: “Ya no quiero amar mas. I want to give him his teeth
back. I want to stop dreaming of howls
and bury the moon he gave me
in the valley of childhood.
Through a conversation between a child and mother, this poem crafts the passage of time in a way that felt like a gut punch when I realized what was happening. Angel’s poems always have a gorgeous lyrical rhythm to them, and this one’s no exception. The last lines are some of my favorite in recent memory. Poignant and perfect ending.
By Gwendolyn Hicks in Uncanny Magazine
this is not a joke, although you treat it like it is.
that is how you manage, isn’t it? invert every catastrophe,
until it is something with ten syllables and a punchline.this, too, is running.
This poem is all about speed/movement, but also about the fear of staying still and losing time. I love how it plays with shape (the poem is best viewed on desktop), creating a slightly different reading experience for each section, with so many wonderful, unexpected verbs and turns of phrase too like “lightning sewn along your angles” and “your afterimage haunts the skyline like a bruise.” Sometimes a poem is best enjoyed when read aloud so you can savor the rhythm and word choices, and this one is perfect for that.
Nature Knows A Little About Blooming
Prosper C. Ìféányí in Reckoning
The river no longer sings to me; and I know,
in the basin of my throat, what holds it back
I love the seamless confluence of nature and bodily images throughout this poem. In this portrait of environmental destruction and those who live within it, Ìféányí effectively draws the reader through both the beauty and (largely human-induced) devastation of nature, making the damage more visceral through bodily metaphor (e.g. oil “flagellating the skin of the sea”)
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Angela Liu is a Chinese-American writer/poet based in NYC and Tokyo. She is a three-time Nebula Award and 2025 Astounding Award Finalist. Her work has also been nominated for the Hugo, Locus, Ignyte, and Rhysling Awards. She previously researched mixed reality at Keio University in Japan with a focus on new narrative platforms. She now writes about intergenerational trauma and weird things. Her stories and poems are published/forthcoming in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, and Lightspeed, among others.
Find her on Twitter/Instagram at @liu_angela and on Bluesky.
