Los Angeles has long been called a laboratory of the future. It's been repeatedly said that what happens in L.A. first often starts happening everywhere else sometime soon. Whether it’s been ICE raids or the deployment of the National Guard this has happened again and again in 2025. So many societal developments happen here first. This year’s booklist reflects the zeitgeist of these uncertain times. Almost all of these were released in 2025, but a few from late 2024 and while several are LA-centric titles, quite a few apply to Greater California, the West Coast, and the prevailing spirit that’s in the American air right now.
The books listed here not only meditate on current events like the Los Angeles wildfires, late stage capitalism, and rising xenophobia, they also reflect our vibrant local literary culture, especially the archipelago of groundbreaking indie publishers like Angel City Press, Beyond Baroque Books, DSTL Arts, Giant Claw Press, Hat & Beard Press, Heyday Books, Hinchas Press, What Books, and World Stage Press.
And while a book cannot stop evil forces it can educate us, warn us, and prepare us for what’s coming. Moreover, literature like music and art inspire and provide strength which we need now more than ever. This is my sixth year in a row compiling a book list for L.A. TACO. Read on for 25 books from 2025!
"Makeshift Altar" by Amy Alvarez
Exploring the cultural, spiritual and geographical experiences of growing up Afro-Caribbean and African American, Amy Alvarez takes readers on a journey of self discovery and multicultural American identity. There’s music in these poems matched by social commentary as evidenced by pieces like “Hood Aesthetic,” “An Old White Woman Touched My Hair at Rising Creek Bakery,” and “I Am Whatever You Think.” Alvarez is a part of the Affrilachian Poets collective and she never misses with her poetics.
"Water Mirror Echo: Bruce Lee and the Making of Asian America" by Jeff Chang
"Water Mirror Echo" is the Bruce Lee biography that puts the Kung Fu superstar’s career into a much wider historical perspective. Beyond just the behind the scenes stories of movies like "Enter the Dragon," Chang elevates the personal and the political of Lee’s life to document a movement, era, and generation of Asian Americans. Drawing from private letters, rare documents, and interviews with the star’s closest relations, Chang shows how Lee overcame enormous obstacles navigating Hong Kong, Hollywood, Asian tenements, American ghettos, and racist movie studios. "Water Mirror Echo" catalogs nearly every step of Lee’s journey, including his friendships with Kareem Abdul-Jabber, Steve McQueen, Chuck Norris, and pioneering Asian-American actress Nancy Kwan. Chang even covers Lee’s connection to L.A. like his former Chinatown studio and his Bel-Air home. Reading this in-depth account of how Bruce Lee became the giant we all know him as is nothing short of fascinating and inspiring.
"The Portrait Gallery Called Existence" by Neeli Cherkovski
The portrait poems in this collection honor great poets like Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Bob Kaufman, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Kerouac, Rimbaud, and Los Angeles giants Lewis MacAdams and Wanda Coleman. The L.A.-raised Cherkovski was Bukowski’s first biographer and a close comrade with the dirty old man in the 1960s and '70s before relocating 50 years ago to San Francisco's North Beach. These poems connect surrealism, the Beat Generation, and the New York School of poets in a pithy poetic autobiography. In this spirit, there are also poems honoring his family members and poignant self-portraits. Cherkovski passed away in 2024 and had always wanted to be published by City Lights. Though it’s tragic he finally accomplished this feat posthumously, this is a remarkable collection of poems. This volume is like hitting a home run in your last at bat or Kobe scoring 60 in his final NBA game.
"¡Pónk!" by Marcus Clayton
Coming straight out of South Gate with one of the most original memoirs I have ever read, the multi-genre Afro-Latino writer Marcus Clayton explores the intersection of race, punk and academia. Years before Clayton became a community college professor, he played in a punk band that came to rise in the backyards of saoutheast L.A. County. Anecdotes about his band Pipebomb! make up a significant section of the book but there’s also meditations about coming from a mixed race home of a Black father and Costa Rican mother and what it’s like to feel alienated from Black cops in his family. There’s also passages about Black Lives Matter protests, South Gate’s white flight, and Clayton’s experience adjuncting in both South Central and Orange County. “Sweat dried onto our clothes and skin—but we hug,” Clayton writes, “for the first time, refusing to let go of the backyard, our sweat synthesizing together. We witnessed the stars become stage lights for the punk that always made the most sense to us, we witnessed all the bodies alive in the dance circle.”
"Firespitter: The Collected Poems of Jayne Cortez" by Jayne Cortez
At just over 640 pages, this book cements the legacy of Jayne Cortez as one of the greatest poets to ever come out of Los Angeles. Though she passed in 2012 and lived the last four decades of her life in New York, Cortez grew up in Watts and played an important part of the West Coast Black Arts movement in the 1960s. Her provocative poems were spoken word before they came up with the term and she did indeed spit fire with her voice. Take these bars for example:
“My friend / they don't care / if you're an individualist / a leftist a rightist / a shithead or a snake /
They will try to exploit you / absorb you confine you / disconnect you isolate you / or kill you.”
Cortez also recorded several albums of her poetry with jazz musicians. This massive book holds a compendium of her influence. When I interviewed the great Los Angeles poet Wanda Coleman in 2013, she told me her North Star was Jayne Cortez.
"Crooked Out of Compton" by Ron L. Dowell
This highly original collection of short stories penetrates into the heart of Compton and Watts with tales of single mothers, younger brothers, sheriff deputies, school food service workers, and even a young boy that wishes he was an insect. Dowell was born in Watts and he gets the geography right in page after page. From the Watts Towers to the Compton Creek, these vignettes show the real landscape of South Central Los Angeles and the complicated relationships which exist in the community.
"California Rewritten: A Journey Through the Golden State’s New Literature" by John Freeman
Readers of L.A. TACO know that Los Angeles and California are an epicenter of a new wave of 21st Century literary culture, but the east coast literary elite is only just now waking up to this fact. Literary critic and editor John Freeman has been the host of the Alta Journal’s popular California Book Club for the last five years which features a California book each month. The essays here cover over 50 books, mostly novels with a few memoirs, nonfiction, and poetry titles mixed in.
Freeman reminds us that “more Californians have won Pulitzers in literature in the past decade than writers from any other region in America.” Freeman’s insightful essays mix anecdotes, California history, and illuminating insight to highlight the book and author he’s spotlighting in each respective essay. Beyond covering legendary local favorites like Myriam Gurba, Steph Cha, Naomi Hirahara, Walter Mosley, Natalia Molina, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Percival Everett and Hector Tobar, Freeman also points us to indigenous writers like Natalie Diaz and Deborah Miranda.
“Writing, after all, like all art forms,” Freeman avers, “is social; it draws its power from the sounds and concerns of people, from the histories they carry in their bodies.” If you’re looking for new California books to read you will find more than a few dozen here ready to be discovered.
"All the Sad Music" by Nikolai Garcia
Raised in South Central Los Angeles, Nikolai Garcia has quietly become one of Los Angeles’s most heartbreaking poets for over a decade. The poems here meditate on oldies, new wave, hip hop, emo, and bizarre love triangles. “What’s there is not spoken; not / whispered. What’s there is reflected / in a shot of whiskey,” Garcia tells us. Responding to lines from Fugazi, Kendrick Lamar, Pearl Jam, Mazzy Star, Nipsey Hussle, Nirvana, the Zombies, and Las Ligas Menores, this is a poetic mixtape with pathos for days.
"Catching Fire: The Los Angeles Wildfires" edited by S.A. Griffin & Richard Modiano
Fifty-eight writers come together in this new anthology to rise from the ashes of the January 2025 Los Angeles fires in Altadena and the Palisades. About a dozen writers in the collection lost their homes and there are some gut wrenching reflections on the unprecedented tragedy. There are also beautiful tributes to the many multigenerational Black Angelenos who have called Altadena home for over a century. Though this book was just published a few weeks ago in early December, I had to get in on this list because of its poignancy. One of the writers, Pam Ward has had family in the Pasadena/Altadena area since 1904. Her poem honoring the late Victor Shaw who died protecting his Altadena poem, captures the resilience of our city. “Sometimes you fight,” Ward declares, “until all the sweat leaves your skin holding on, holding the last weapon you possess even if it’s just a water hose in your hand.”
"Processing America & Orphan Poems" by Eric Lawson
Every once in a while a poem comes along that perfectly captures the spirit of the cultural moment. Eric Lawson accomplishes this in "Processing America." The other nine pieces collected here are equally prescient as Lawson repeatedly reminds us that “History never truly goes away. It just gets conveniently buried.” Poignant truths planted in these lines explode like a George Carlin monologue with aphoristic wit you’ll find yourself reflecting on long after reading. Lawson’s punchlines hit like a comedian but like the recent truths expounded on by Dave Chappelle, you might find yourself wishing they were not so true.
"California Southern" by Adolfo Guzman Lopez
Adolfo Guzman Lopez venerates the sacred altars of his experience in this compelling book of poems. Beginning in San Diego in 1993 as a founding member of the influential Taco Shop Poets, Guzman-Lopez’s investigative poetry eventually brought him to Los Angeles where he became an award-winning reporter for National Public Radio. These poems “capture the leaving of your home, the wind through the window, the dust from the fields and roads, and seeing wary eyes and friendly smiles at our destinations” while revering cultural, historical and personal landscapes from Baja to New Mexico to San Francisco. California Southern emerges from a lineage that includes Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, the bilingual poetry of Alurista, Oscar Zeta Acosta and Adolfo’s Tijuana aunts who were educators and his early mentors. The poet’s Spanglish compounds the verisimilitude and rhythm of his vision.
"Crime Wave" by Suzanne Lummis
Suzanne Lummis is one of the premier progenitors of the poem noir. Pontificating on the mean streets, classic murder mysteries, dangerous dames and 21st Century corrupt politics, Lummis is darkly comic and prophetic simultaneously. With titles like “He Who Has Nothing to Hide Has Nothing to Fear,” and “The Other Woman,” her irreverent sensibility echoes off the page in verse that’s laugh out loud funny. “Remember that old story?, she writes. “The guy who says he’s heading out, / down to the corner, for cigarettes? And never comes back?” Comedy, confession and compassion come together in this collection of lyrical virtuosity.
"Poetry Goes to the Movies" edited by Suzanne Lummis
This 250-plus page collection features 100 writers, including both Los Angeles poets and dozens of notable bards from across the country paying homage to movies and the many figures connected to them. Responding to over a century of films from "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" to "Mothra" to "Do the Right Thing" to "Killers of the Flower Moon" to "Zombie Apocalypse" while reminiscing on silent films, drive-in theaters, and forgotten starlets like Marie Windsor and Anna May Wong. The poet Harry Northrup wrote about working with Scorsese in "Taxi Driver." He had four scenes in the movie and even read Travis Bickle lines into a tape recorder so De Niro could study his Midwest accent. This one-of-a-kind poetry book is also a cultural artifact offering insight into the history of film.
"Hollywoodski" by Lou Matthews
Composed of a novel-in-stories, Matthews’ latest follows the career of Dale Davis, a faded screenwriter plagued by his early success but unable to duplicate the glory he had early on. Mixing excerpts from his screenplays, journals and memoir-like reflections, it’s a nonlinear journey that peels back the dark side of Hollywood. There’s also a plethora of L.A. imagery: “I like the power breakfast at Denny’s. About two in the afternoon when the heavy hitters are gone and it’s just me and the philosophers. This is a famous Denny’s, corner of Sunset and Gower, the first 24-hr Denny’s. Jim Morrison used to pass out here. Andy Kaufman used to bus tables here.” Matthews then always follows up his exposition with aphoristic wisdom: “You have a whole lot of people who shouldn’t have any hope at all who got some once making big money at the studio. They’re not over it yet. One of the things that worries me in this modern age is that a lot of people survive who shouldn’t.” Matthews is a fourth-generation Angeleno and his previous novels "L.A. Breakdown" and "Shaky City" also capture our city’s zeitgeist.
"La Bamba" by Merrick Morton
This coffee table book is a compelling collection of photographs taken by the award-winning photographer Merrick Morton during the filming of the Ritchie Valens biopic "La Bamba" in 1985. The black and white images of Lou Diamond Phillips, picturesque pastoral landscapes where the movie was filmed and various musical performances captured here offer a visual history demonstrating why the 1985 flick remains more important than ever. Outstanding essays by Carlos Aguilar and RJ Smith add further context to the film and Valens legacy.
"Taiko Quartz Beat" by D Hideo Maruyama
Maruyama weaves together a poetic history of the Japanese American concentration camps, the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, California mapmaking, and the writings of the L.A. social historian Mike Davis in a hybrid text unlike anything I’ve ever read. The book’s cover features a black and white photo of the abandoned high rise graffiti ghost tower in Downtown Los Angeles. Maruyama not only maps Los Angeles and Long Beach; he bridges Budapest, Hong Kong, Madrid, Tehran and San Salvador. Navigating moods like Marvin Gaye and Pink Floyd, Maruyama reminds us that “ghosts are often hard to avoid and even harder to ignore.”
"Florida Water" by Aja Monet
The surrealist blues poet Aja Monet is not only following the footsteps of Wanda Coleman and Jayne Cortez, she’s carving out her own lane as an international touring musician and cultural worker. I saw her live at the Blue Note in Hollywood in October with a four piece jazz band and she set the house on fire. Her poems wade through climate change, heartbreak, racism, and systemic violence while all the while proposing solutions in an ecology of hope. In the book’s final poem, “Say It With Your Chest,” she reminds us that “whatever touches your heart / feed fuel fight for it / flower heal hold / help have honor it / whatever touches your heart / promise hope hell and highwater / wade with it / shield protect keep it sacred.” Monet is one with it and these poems will raise your frequency.
"Gray Dawn" by Walter Mosley
"Gray Dawn" is the 17th book of Walter Mosley’s "Easy Rawlins" novel series. Set in 1972, the narrative continues Mosley’s tradition of mapping Los Angeles through a continuum of murders, unexpected twists and seductive trysts. Hardly a corner of Southern California is missed by Rawlins as he travels from Watts to Downtown to East Los Angeles to Hollywood to West Covina to Bellflower to Santa Monica to the San Gabriel Mountains. Mosley’s mastery of crafting hard-boiled detective stories is why he’s one of America's most revered living writers. This one ranks among the greatest Los Angeles noir titles ever published.
"Exile on Beach Street" by Kevin Opstedal
“We’re still learning the / shape the sky takes / inside jagged cumulus / smoke-rings of haze / & broken shadow wings that rake the sand,” declares Kevin Opstedal. The Venice Beach born poet writes surf noir verse moving from Baja to the Bay Area while celebrating Pacific Coast Highway, ‘69 Chevy Malibus, jagged coastal rocks, Pt. Reyes, agate sand pebbles, electric eels and stars over Monterey Bay. Though he’s now based near Santa Cruz in Half Moon Bay, I know of no other California poet that captures the coast like Opstedal: “the ocean shimmers / like a thin line of / bluegreen neon lip gloss / smeared against the sky at sunset / & I’m feeling as responsible as a Hawaiian cocktail.” Opstedal was also the publisher of Lewis MacAdams, the cofounder of the Friends of the Los Angeles River and there is a deep underlying thread of environmentalism undergirding all of his work.
"American Oasis" by Kyle Paoletta
The subtitle of this one says it all, "Finding the Future in the Cities of the Southwest.” Connecting the dots between Albuquerque, El Paso, Santa Fe, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Tucson, and the Grand Canyon, the Albuquerque-born scribe Kyle Paoletta shows how the Southwest Sunbelt is much more historic and fascinating than what you see on the surface. Equally an environmental and social history, this is also a poignant travelogue of the Southwest from one of its native sons. “Life in the desert is not new,” Paoletta confides, “but that does not mean that we can take the current scale of it for granted. As the twenty-first century wears on, it will become impossible to ignore the eternal truth that the earth sets the conditions, and the only sensible path for humanity is to meet those terms with humility and grace.”
"The Gate of Memory: Poems by Descendants of Nikkei Wartime Incarceration" edited by Brynn Saito & Brandon Shimoda
“These writers offer fragments of their family stories; a thoughtful documentation of survivors’ denial, anger, grief and triumph passed down through generations,” writes Mitsuye Yamada in the book’s Foreword. Yamada herself is 101 years old and a pioneering Japanese American poet who was sent to Minidoka Internment Camp in 1942 when she was a teenager.
The editors of this anthology see the project as a space of renewal and possibility. Moreover they write that “one of the aftereffects of incarceration could be several generations of descendants overwhelmed with such feeling and the inclination to translate it into literature; that an aftereffect of trauma is the birth of a poem.” Some of the writers include Angeleno greats like Sesshu Foster, Noriko Nakada, traci kato-kiriyama and Amy Uyematsu.
"Sacrament" by Susan Straight
Novelist Susan Straight is one of the most important voices to ever emerge from the Inland Empire. The Riverside-born writer has made a long career of 10 books writing about landscapes that no one else does like the Santa Ana River and Salton Sea. She demonstrates the great skill you would expect from someone mentored by James Baldwin as an undergrad four decades ago. Her new novel celebrates the quiet heroism of a multicultural group of ICU nurses in a San Bernardino hospital during Covid.
Spotlighting the close friendship between Latina and Filipina women nurses, Straight wields a compassion in her work that shows she intimately knows the people and geography she writes about. One of the main characters in this book is named “Grief” and it is a thing of beauty to see how Straight weaves together broken hearts in the midst of tragedy.
"Yellow Power" by Amy Uyematsu
For the time being, this book is only available in France, but Amy Uyematsu is quietly one of the most important Los Angeles poets of the last 50 years. Culled from her previous 6 volumes, this new book is a bilingual collection with 37 of her poems published in both English and French. Uyematsu passed away in June of 2023, but shortly before she selected the 37 most significant pieces of her long career.
In the Spring 1969, Uyematsu was in the first UCLA Asian American Studies class ever offered. Taught by groundbreaking academic Yuji Ichioka. It was for that class that she wrote the essay “The Emergence of Yellow Power in America,” the first time that term appeared in print. Uyematsu’s entire career was spent breaking down doors from her first book "30 Miles From J-Town" to her final work, "That Blue Trickster Time." The 37 poems in this new book provide the perfect primer for her work and lasting influence.
"Zirconium Ash" by Jimmy Vega
The Lynwood-writer Jimmy Vega excavates freeway ghosts, rain in July and what it’s like to merge between big rig trucks on the 710 south. “This is another freeway poem,” Vega declares. “Another poem about fathers / losing mothers / this is a poem about mothers losing children / for selling loose cigarettes.” Vega shows us how “the scrawl blasted on freeway concrete is poetry, same way the light that glares on raw sewage in the flower district is poetry, same way food trucks appear as stanzas on olympic or la brea, that too, is poetry.” Vega pirouettes on the 110 with his friends forecasting “liminal brightness tucked into shadow-play southbound & lost.”
"Elements of Los Angeles: Earth, Water, Air, Fire" by D.J. Waldie
There might not be another writer in California who can capture the nuances of everyday beauty and West Coast culture with the verisimilitude of D.J. Waldie. His latest title uses earth, water, air and fire as central threads to illuminate our city’s past, present and future. Waldie not only tackles familiar themes like our floods and wildfires, he penetrates lesser known crevices like Signal Hill, Terminal Island, and the San Gabriel River.
His essay “The Tree Where Los Angeles Began,” tells the story of “El Aliso” a long gone giant sycamore tree that once had a 200-foot canopy while being a sacred site for worship, gathering and prayer for indigenous residents for thousands of years. Waldie tells us “While El Aliso is long gone, the shade it provided no longer available and the memory of the conversations under its branches long lost, its significance to the Kizh is not forgotten.” Waldie remembers it all.
If you need any inspiration or new energy, please read these titles above.
Happy New Year everyone!
