Best Writing By Me in 2025

From Marin Niemoller to Michelangelo

I probably wrote about 350 essays this year, and close to that many poems. I also published three full length poetry collections and I think ten chapbooks. That is probably too much for anyone; even I can’t remember it all!

In the past I’ve tried to make a somewhat exhaustive list of the writing I’d like people to read…but I think with a list of 30 or 40, it starts to be too much and people just zone out. So this year I thought I’d keep it to 12, and focus on some things that were especially meaningful to me for one reason or another. I’ve written a bit about each as well in hopes of maybe possibly getting someone to actually click through. They’re listed in chronological order, starting in January of 2025.

How Liberalism Uses Jews, and Why It Shouldn’t Do That
Liberal Currents
January 14, 2025

For somewhat obvious reasons I’ve been thinking over the last couple years about why Zionism has such an appeal not just to Christofascists, and not just to Jews, but to mainstream liberals like Joe Biden. This is my effort to suggest some historical reasons, looking at the 1848 revolutions, the Dreyfuss Affair, and US involvement in World War II.

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Martin Neimoller Was An Antisemite
Everything Is Horrible
February 17, 2025

Niemöller’s famous poem (“First they came for…”) is generally thought of as a description of why indifference to fascism is dangerous. I think it’s actually more complicated and uglier than that, though. Niemöller was an open antisemite who supported Hitler because he wanted Jews forced out of public life. This piece tries to explain why the difference matters.

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Messy Neurons, Messier House
Motley Bloom
March 17, 2025

I’ve gotten more comfortable identifying as neurodivergent this year, and wrote a bit more about it. This is a light-hearted confessional essay about cleaning clutter while autistic. Have I mentioned that we foiled a burglar once because the house was so messy they couldn’t find anything to steal? That is but one of the humiliating revelations contained herein!

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Langston Hughes’ ‘Goodbye Christ’ Is the Poem of the Hour
Sojourner’s
March 19, 2025

Langston Hughes is one of my favorite poets, so I was thrilled to get a chance to write about him and how his struggle against Christofascists in his own day is still, unfortunately, relevant to our own.

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Invasion of the Founding Fathers
Lothlorien
April 28, 2025

I think the last time I published a full length short story was 30 years ago. This is a bizarre, Philip K. Dick influenced sci-fi/espionage/mold zombie story about how the patriarchs seem to always be reconquering us. Pretty sure literally no one read it, and I wish someone would read it, so here it is.

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May Day march in Chicago brings together anti-Trump coalition
Prism Reports
May 7, 2025

My forays into on-the-ground reporting are few and far between. But I was proud of this piece on the anti-Trump May Day march in Chicago, which talks about the way that the left and more mainstream Democrats coordinated to prepare to resist the Trump regime. I think the reporting holds up well given the ICE escalation and the widespread opposition to it in the city in the second half of the year.

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Myself Am Ever Mine Own Counterfeit
Bottlecap Press
July 14, 2025

As I said, I published a bunch of poetry books of various lengths this year. Myself Is Ever Mine Own Counterfeit is a chapbook of (very loose) translations of Michelangelo’s sonnets. I love writing these, and I think they’re pretty fun to read—but the book I think mostly slipped under every radar—maybe two people bought it? It’s $10, and I think it’s one of the best things I wrote this year. Here’s one of the poems in an effort to maybe get you to check out the whole thing.

Love and Sculpture

The greatest sculptor finds in whitest stone
his thought in stone. That’s all there is. He delves
beneath the surface for the rock of self.
His hand unearths his eye, his thoughts, his groans.

And so, in love, in you, I see not you
but my own thought. I sculpt with heart my heart
in your cool stone: lips that in welcome part;
stone lips that speak of heartlessness and rue.

I taste your tongue; with tongue I trace your thought:
your beauty, love, disdain, hard-heartedness,
and taste in each my pain and my hard care.

In you I shape my is and my is not;
the life we share; the life that from me slips.
No blame in you; I carve my own despair.

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‘Make Me Famous’ Reminds Us That Ed Brezinski, and All Artists, Deserve Better
Observer.com
August 22, 2025

My editor asked me to write about this documentary on the New York art scene of the 80s, and I was startled to discover a couple of my friends from way back, James Romberger and Marguerite Van Cook, play a significant role in the proceedings. The film is a painful chronicle of the life of a painter who didn’t make it, which underlines how callously and cruelly we treat artists in this country. Mega-success should not be the only path to a sustainable art career; the arts sustain us all, and we need to make it possible for artists to do that sustaining, damn it.

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Paddling With the New York School
Splice Today
August 26, 2025

I’m not a big enough poet to have anyone write criticism about me, so I figured I’d just write criticism of myself. At Splice Today I published a series of posts about the New York School poets, and concluded with this very self-indulgent discussion of how Ashbery, O’Hare, and the rest influenced my own writing. There are a couple of poems by me in there too.

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How Do Freelancers Survive Today? An Interview with a 20-Year Veteran
Jane Friedman
October 7, 2025

Publishing industry journalist Jane Friedman interviewed me at length about freelance writing and why you should not get into this collapsing, hideous industry for the love of god, save yourself. It was a fun, if bleak, discussion. Jane keeps asking me if there’s a ray of light somewhere, and I keep saying, no, I’m sorry, no.

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The Self And Neurodivergence And The Other Self
Everything Is Horrible
November 23, 2025

Inspired by Jonathan Sterne’s Diminished Faculties: A Political Phenomenology of Impairment, I tried to think through the experience of neurodivergence, which is in part the experience of not being able to articulate the experience of neurodivergence. I talk about my stims, getting bullied, Lacan, and not being the autistic person reporting on autism. It’s one of the most ambitious pieces I wrote this year.

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Who Exactly Is Having a “Crisis of Masculinity”?
Dame Magazine
December 16, 2025

I wrote about how raising a trans daughter really makes you aware of how enforced masculinity is a problem for everyone, of every gender. Scott Galloway, Jordan Peterson, Tucker Carlson, and so on claim that we need to celebrate masculinity, but demanding everyone reverence traditional masculinity harms men, and really harms all those people who aren’t men too.

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As I said, I wrote a lot of poetry this year, you can check out a lot of it here. If you have an essay of mine you liked that isn’t here, feel free to post in comments. And if you read the interview about freelancing with Jane Friedman and feel sorry for me, consider becoming a paid contributor. It’s $5/month, $50/year; it’s the best way to keep me afloat as the industry collapses around me.