The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: The Best Best Dressed of 2024

This week, Managing Editor Krista Cox shares her 5 favorite books featured on The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed in 2024, and shares a new selection from each.

Krista’s final selection for the best of 2024 is Animal Unfit by Megan Nichols (Belle Point Press 2023), originally chosen by guest editor L.M. Cole.

Medicinal

I start accepting food from the neighbors:
Handful of tomatoes before they rot.
Annual s’more at the bonfire. I savor
odd things—quick knock at the door, apricot
pit in the window. Small shrines appear.
There are flats of strawberries. Homemade
broth to help a harmed esophagus heal.
We all mend, somewhere, in the exchange.
Little gifts evolve into meals, board games
after lunch. One day my son is with grand-
mother neighbors, pulling weeds in the yard.
I’m at their side before I understand.
We kneel together, chewing on mint leaves,
like it’s no miracle, like it’s ordinary.

Megan Nichols is the author of the chapbook Animal Unfit (Belle Point Press, 2023). Her poems have appeared in The Threepenny Review, Poetry Daily, Plume, and elsewhere. She serves as Managing Editor at Variant Literature. Born and raised in Southern California, she currently lives in the Arkansas Ozarks.

L.M. Cole is a poet and artist residing in North Carolina. She is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Bulb Culture Collective whose writing and art have been published with The Pinch Journal, The McNeese Review, Five South, The Dodge, and many other excellent journals and magazines. She can be found on Twitter @_scoops__ and more of her work can be found at linktr.ee/lmcole