Our Best of the Net Nominations

 

Each year, Poets Online nominates poems for the Pushcart Prize Anthology. This year, for the first time, we are nominating poems for the Best of the Net Anthology. This annual, awards-based literary anthology hopes to acknowledge and promote exceptional work (poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and art) that has been originally published online. That seems a good fit for Poets Online.

The Best of the Net Anthology and the Pushcart Prize Anthology are two of the most prestigious and distinct literary awards for small presses, and they primarily differ in the medium they honor. Best of the Net is exclusively for work first published on the web or in an e-zine/digital format.

I appreciate that this anthology provides a platform for a diverse collection of writers and publishers who are shaping the online literary landscape, and brings greater respect to the continually expanding world of digital publishing, which often offers greater access to a wider array of voices than traditional print publishing.

We had five readers who went through published poems from July 2024 to June 2025. There were over 30 poems that received at least one nomination by a judge. Our six allowable nominations received the most mentions. 

Here are our nominations for the 2026 Best of the Net Anthology:

LIBRARY GHOSTS by Rob Miller 
SPIRITING AWAY by Lynn White
ISLAND by Susan Spaeth Cherry  
AFTER THE BURIAL by Rob Friedman
ELEGY WRITTEN IN A CEMETERY by Taylor Graham
LETTING GO by Paul Hostovsky

The Best of the Net anthology is produced by Sundress Publications, a non-profit literary press collective founded in 2000 that is entirely volunteer-run. Sundress publishes chapbooks and full-length works in both print and digital formats, and hosts a variety of online journals. They are also the umbrella site for numerous publications, including the Best of the Net Anthology, Stirring, Rogue Agent, Doubleback Review, and beestung. 

Prompt: Personal Transition and Nature

 

I saw that Arthur Sze has been appointed our newest U.S. Poet Laureate. (See "Arthur Sze at the Library of Congress.") That news sent me looking at some of his poetry. The poem I landed on for this call for submissions is "At the Equinox."

The equinox, a moment of equal light and darkness, symbolizes equilibrium and change. Sze uses this celestial event to explore emotional and spiritual transitions. The poem’s structure mirrors this balance—shifting between vivid natural imagery and introspective reflection.

We have published issues here about the solstice and seasons, but this month we aren't really concerned about spring or autumn,as much as about the balance tipping to a change in a life. The change of seasons might be what tips the equilibrium for us. Certainly, the solstices and equinoxes were important since ancient times, especially in agrarian societies. Autumn coincides with harvests and the start of school. Spring is full of renewal, and summer is often a time of vacations and more time outsdoors.

Sze's poem suggests how the external world can reflect our internal rhythms. The line “looping out into the world, we thread and return” suggests a cyclical journey that internally could be love, memory, or self-discovery. The poem also moves geographically (from Homer to Roanoke), implying that emotional resonance transcends physical space. The speaker admits, “I have no theory of radiance,” because some of what is happening can't be explained and suggests we might be better to experience rather than explain. Turning the gaze upwards to the Moon’s “gleam” and “tides of starlight” evokes a kind of wonder at the vastness and mystery of the universe which might also touch personal experience.

I think that what the poem attempts in using nature as mirror and describing “orange and purple sea stars,” “rain evaporates off pine needles,” and “forsythia buds and blooms” are not just scenic observations, but reflections on inner states of awareness and emotion.

For this submission, can you, in your real or imagined life, think of moments of transition when the balance tipped, and can you connect them to changes in nature? It might not be an equinox or solstice. Perhaps, it is the changing of the tide, the rising or setting of the Sun, the first or last frost, a coming or leaving storm, fog lifting, Moon phases, meteor showers, or the first flower or fruit in your garden. 

 The deadline for submissions for the next issue is October 31, 2025. Please refer to our submission guidelines and look at our archive of 26 years of prompts and poems.

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Arthur Sze (b. 1950, New York City) is an American poet, and translator whose work interweaves nature, science, and Eastern-Western traditions. The son of Chinese immigrants, Sze studied briefly at MIT before transferring to UC Berkeley, where he completed a BA in a self-designed poetry major. Over a career spanning five decades, he has published twelve poetry collections and numerous translations, essays, and interviews. His most recent works include the poetry collection Into the Hush (Copper Canyon Press, 2025) and the prose-and-verse volume The White Orchard: Selected Interviews, Essays, and Poems (Museum of New Mexico Press, 2025).
Now, as the 25th U.S. Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry by the Library of Congress for the 2025-2026 term, he plans to emphasize poetry in translation as a way to deepen public engagement with poetry and enrich the national poetic imagination.

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Who Was Robert Frost?

By the middle of the twentieth century, Robert Frost was the best-loved poet in America. He was our nation’s bard, simple and sincere, accompanying us on wooded roads and articulating our hopes and fears.

Who is your Robert Frost? Homespun wise poet sage? Sharp-witted trickster? A poet whose simplicity hides startling depth? Cranky old poet?

I read Maggie Doherty’s piece, titled “The Many Guises of Robert Frost," in The New Yorker, which explores how the poet constructed an image of simplicity. That simplicity was part of his public persona and also his poetic style, but he was more complex and often contradictory. Doherty is reviewing Adam Plunkett's 2025 book Love and Need: The Life of Robert Frost’s Poetry.

Early on, I considered Frost to be the persona of a rural, unassuming farmer-poet. I saw him like the photo on the cover of Plunkett's book. I liked that Frost was not like the literary elites in Boston or London. Later, I found that he was highly learned and deeply engaged with the literary tradition. A mask.

It seems like everyone had to read "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" and "The Road Not Taken" in high school. You could read them in a sincere or ironic way. I heard from teachers interpretations that ranged from celebratory to somber or even nihilistic. Was he stopping in the woods and considering suicide? Frost would shake off such interpretations. 

Frost embraced ambiguity. In a 1960 interview with The Paris Review, he described himself as liking “to fool… to be mischievous,” operating through “suggestiveness and double entendre.” He often hinted at multiple meanings rather than stating anything outright.

He wasn't a modernist in rebellion like some contemporaries. If you were writing a serious college paper on him, you could get into how he reworked canonical forms and references from Shakespeare’s “Carpe Diem” songs to Coleridge. He adapted rather than invented.

Robert Frost’s first four published books of verse, established his reputation as a preeminent American poet. A Boy’s Will (1913) is full of New England themes, traditional meters with colloquial language. next was North of Boston (1914), includes “Mending Wall,” and the rural scenes have deeper philosophical meanings. His third book, Mountain Interval (1916), contains “The Road Not Taken.” The fourth book, New Hampshire (1923), earned him his first Pulitzer Prize and includes “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”

Frost’s late life was marked by grief, strained family ties, allegations of infidelity, and an abrasive public image that contrasted sharply with his genteel public persona.

It seems that Frost viewed his contradictions not as flaws but as essential to his poetic vitality. He credited “animus”—inner drive and conflict—as a key source of his creativity and was pleased when T. S. Eliot praised him as the “most eminent… Anglo-American poet now living.”

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Follow this blog for all things poetry.
To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
visit our website at poetsonline.org

Arthur Sze Is the New U.S. Poet Laureate

The Library of Congress announced this week that Arthur Sze, 74, will be the next Poet Laureate of the United States.

The NY Times describes Sze as an observational poet, whose work is grounded in nature and imagery. He said he first learned his craft by translating ancient Chinese poems. Over time, his poems grew longer, often made up of numbered sequences that changed perspective and tone from one section to another. His newer poems look simpler, but hopefully, he said, they are deeper.

“When you read a poem, you don’t need to feel like you get it all at once,” Sze said. “The best poems communicate through sound and rhythm and musicality. And as you read and reread, the poem emerges.”

Born in New York City to immigrants from China (his father had a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from M.I.T.), he has lived most of his life in New Mexico, where he taught at the Institute of American Indian Arts for more than two decades. As poet laureate, he said he plans to focus on poetry that has been translated into English from other languages.

His latest poetry collection - his 12th -  is Into the Hush.

Poet Laureate | Poetry & Literature | Programs | Library of Congress

View Resource Guide on Arthur Sze

News Release: Library of Congress Names Arthur Sze the Nation's 25th U.S. Poet Laureate

Arthur Sze | The Poetry Foundation

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Follow this blog for all things poetry.
To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
visit our website at poetsonline.org