The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: The Best Best Dressed of 2025

This week, Managing Editor Merrick Sloane shares a new selection from each of their 8 favorite books featured on The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed in 2025.

Merrick’s second selection for the best of 2025 is from How to Monetize Despair by Lisa Mottolo (Unsolicited Press, 2023).

There are Monsters

I once killed several caterpillars
below a tree that was dripping with them

as though they were rain or sap,
and their falls were silent as a balloon.

Don’t ask me about their faces,
too small to know there are monsters

they have evolved to evade.
Really, the tree was dripping.

All I ever wanted was to marry the Titanic.
To break into gigantic pieces

so everyone would know
something happened here.

But instead I became a daughter left
by a mother who loved lighthouses,

those romantic things with bright lights
that show the ship the shore.

Lisa Mottolo is a neurodivergent poet living in Austin, TX. She is the author of the poetry collection How to Monetize Despair (Unsolicited Press, 2023) and she is the Founding Editor at Lit Fox Books. Lisa has attended writing programs at UC Berkeley and Kenyon College, and her work has appeared in Penn Review, The Laurel Review, Diagram, Santa Clara Review, and others. You can find her doing typical poet things like admiring birds, romanticizing the dark, and being overstimulated at AWP.

Merrick Sloane (they/them) is a neuro-Queer 90’s kid and nonbinary poet, editor, and researcher from Oklahoma who’s a sucker for expletives and second languages. They hold an MFA in creative writing from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and are Associate Poetry Editor of Doubleback Review. Merrick’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Central Dissent: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality,BLEACH!, citizen trans* {project}, Arcana Poetry, Puerto del Sol, ANMLY, Fruitslice, among others. Merrick’s poetry was recently selected as a winner of the Garden Party Collective’s contest on Neurodivergence / Intersectionality and as a winner for AWP’s 2025 Intro Journal Awards. Their work has received support from the DreamYard Rad(ical) Poetry Consortium, Poets House, and Sundress Publications. When they are not writing or editing, Merrick loves to serve as a pillow for their cat, Kitten, while getting lost in new worlds written by other dreamers. Merrick is deeply committed to helping create a world that liberates us all.