In 2025, I read a total of 35 books, five fewer than my record pace last year and seven ahead of my previous high in 2020. (Sure, there are a few more days in the year, but we have family visiting, and I don't see getting to book 36.)
Even if I had read more than one book of poetry this year, I'm confident this title would have topped my list.
Flight Plan, M. Soledad Caballero, 2025
Paige and I got to attend the launch event at White Whale Bookstore for our friend Soledad's second poetry collection. It was a buoyant night with three other poets "opening" for the main event. This collection again touches themes established in her debut, I Was a Bell: migration (human and avian), family history, cancer, the blessings and challenges of middle age. Caballero's poems ring with honesty and dark humor. They often shake a fist at the sky and ask WTF? One of the best single lines appears late in the book opening the poem "In Pennsylvania":
"Sometimes, there is more love in a book
than in the whole day."
The poem goes on to contemplate the bright shinyness we can get from a book when everything going on outside its covers is grim and foreboding. It's fitting. I felt that way about reading this book in this most awful year for our country and what we think of as civilization.
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