Thanksgiving Menu-Poem 2025: A Feast of Words Returns

Thanksgiving Menu-Poem 2025: A Feast of Words Returns

Each November, as the days shorten and kitchens begin to hum with familiar holiday preparations, I look forward to releasing a tradition that has accompanied my life as both poet and publisher for more than two decades: the Thanksgiving Menu-Poem. What began in 2002 as a playful tribute to Charles Bernstein has grown into an annual ritual, part feast, part poem, part gathering of spirit, and this year’s edition, Thanksgiving Menu-Poem 2025, has just been released on the BlazeVOX website.

The full piece is available here:
https://www.blazevox.org/thanksgiving-menupoem/thanksgiving-menu-poem-2025


This year’s piece blends poetry, collage, and culinary imagination into a single dining-table-shaped experience. Each poem arrives paired with a “dish,” described with the kind of attentive detail you’d expect from a chef’s tasting menu: smoked leek ash, dill oil, cultured butter, beurre blanc, ginger broth, gold-potato espuma. They act almost like emotional seasonings, evoking place, memory, and the ephemeral pleasures of the table.

The courses themselves move through moods that feel particularly suited to late November. We begin with “Sleeting”, a quick shimmer of a toast, before moving on to poems like “Empty Magnification”, a meditation on scars and visibility, and “A Bridge Between Worlds”, the central poem of the collection and the piece from which the year’s collage image was created. There’s a sense of transition in these works, between seasons, states of mind, and ways of seeing, as though each course lifts a lid on a different atmosphere.

Later in the meal we step into “The Works,” shifting between public violence and the soft comfort of breakfast; we glide into “The Night’s Treasure,” a dreamlike childhood adventure; and we close with “Everything is Bananas,” a dessert that tastes light but lingers with quiet contemplation. It’s a menu that moves from sparkle to reflection, from gravity to play, much, I suppose, like the holiday itself.

Underlying the whole project is the idea of table-making: of setting something before others in good faith, even when distances stretch wide and the year has demanded more than expected. I like to think that the Menu-Poem gathers people in its own way, not just around a literal table, but around a shared moment of imagination. “As you read,” the introduction notes, “imagine yourself at the table, raising a glass, tasting words, and carrying their flavors with you.” That invitation, simple as it appears, feels especially meaningful this year.

The full Thanksgiving Menu-Poem 2025, including the introduction, poem-courses, collage, and fictional dishes, is now available on the BlazeVOX website. I hope it brings you a moment of warmth, playfulness, reflection, or even a spark of delight as we move into the holiday season.

Thank you for reading, and I wish you, your families, and your beautiful tables a happy Thanksgiving.

The full piece is available here:
https://www.blazevox.org/thanksgiving-menupoem/thanksgiving-menu-poem-2025