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 Love Letters from a Burning Planet by MJ Gomez (Variant Lit, 2023).

Angel

There he was: grief-eyed lightning
struck
                                             with tenderness.
                Coughing up hope
to make way                       for the water
                entering his lungs.

                                I knew that boy was an angel
because his rage was sung,
                                              not spoken.
His hands
                                that destroyed nothing
                  but themselves.

                  His skin already soaked through
with everything but light.
                  Because he looked into the fire
and saw only                        the light’s consequence.

Divine fury. Righteous blood
-letting.                  The earth cradles him
                                                                like a grenade.

Snowdrop.                            Rainfall.
                                He is every beautiful thing named
                at the moment of its dying.

MJ Gomez is the author of Love Letters from a Burning Planet (Variant Literature, 2023). His poems are featured in Frontier Poetry, the Dawn Review, Shō Poetry Journal, and others.

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.