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 next selection for the best of 2025 is from Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms by Joan Kwon Glass (Perugia Press, 2024).

DEAR GHOSTS OF THE 1948 JEJU UPRISING,

I am spending the summer here on the island with my grandmother
where tobacco-chewing 아저씨 sell red bean popsicles
and melon ice cream beneath hagyul trees.
I wander the beaches beyond which pearl divers holding their breath
submerge in the Pacific, then sell or eat what they find
to keep their families alive.

When I grow tired of 오징어, abalone, and rice,
my grandmother finds a place that sells American food.
I gorge on pizza and plain hamburgers, tiny cans of Sprite
which Koreans always sip with a straw, but I
pour down my throat like an American.
From our room at the Hyatt, I drift to sleep each night
as my grandmother says her Christian prayers aloud
in the bed next to me, as the lily-scented warm wind
outside my open window perfumes my dreams
of silver boats floating near the horizon.

I know only a few phrases in Korean: that hurts / may I
please have strawberries / I don’t understand.
My grandmother knows only hello and goodbye, yes and no in English.
One day I teach her to say fish, but because in Korean there is no letter “f,”
it sounds like peesh. When I giggle at her she says it again
and we go on like that for a while, me trying to teach her,
and she saying pish, peesh, pish, both of us laughing
until our eyes brim with salt water.

Ghosts of Jeju: if you could speak and I could
understand you, what would you say?
Nearby, a guide leads tourists to Doteul Cave.
In 1948 you hid here for sixty days, decided you’d had enough of war,
mostly farmers caught between sides, determined

to no longer belong to anyone but each other.
Would you say hello, say it hurts, say pish
over and over until the boats cross the horizon, until I dream myself
into the cave where your moon-white bones stand together still,
in our still-divided country, roaring in every language?

Joan Kwon Glass is a Korean diasporic author, winner of the 2024 Perugia Press Poetry Prize for Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms, and author of Night Swim, winner of the Diode Book Prize (Diode Editions, 2022), as well as the chapbooks How to Make Pancakes for a Dead Boy (Harbor Editions, 2022) and If Rust Can Grow on the Moon (Milk & Cake Press, 2022). Her poems have been featured in The Margins (Asian American Writers’ Workshop), Poetry, Poetry Daily, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, Salamander, The Slowdown, Tahoma Literary Review, and elsewhere. She lives in coastal Connecticut where she is a public school educator, and she teaches poetry at writing centers throughout the country.

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.