What the Hell Did I Just Live Though? 2025, A Year I’m Not Comfortable Reviewing
With 2025 a corpse shot in the head and dumped in a ditch, and 2026 racing out of the gate like a retarded child piloting a missile-laden Chinook, it is tempting to piss this column away just reviewing bullshit that happened during the last 365 days. This goes against my entire nature. Spreading my opinion across the internet is as foreign a concept to me as an afternoon devoted to frisbee golf. I understand that people do it, but I don’t approve.
Does it really matter what I thought the best movie I saw last year was? I watched eight percent of the movies released. Fifty percent of the movies I watched while reading a book. How reliable are my opinions? You know which movie I hated the most last year? The Smashing Machine starring The Rock. I didn’t even watch the movie, but I hate it all the same. It’s going to take more than a prosthetic nose to turn that goofy sumbitch into an award-caliber actor. Or a watchable actor. I’d rather watch two hours of Billy Zane lumbering around pretending to be Marlon Brando. Maybe I just don’t like seeing bald idiots wearing wigs. I don’t know. That’s going to have to be something my therapist explains to me.
I can tell you “One Battle After Another” certainly wasn’t the best movie released last year. Don’t believe the hype. And I’m not a Paul Thomas Anderson hater, though I believe him to be vastly overrated. “There Will Be Blood” remains in my top ten all time films. OBAA was filmed competently enough. As a movie, it was far superior to “The Grinch Who Stole Bitches.” But at least the Grinch movie resisted the urge to name a character “Jungle Pussy” though it would have been far more fitting. And I’m not clutching my pearls here at some fictional character calling herself Jungle Pussy. In fact, when I first typed that, I fat-fingered the keys and wrote “Juggle Pussy” which is far more interesting, and a name I would have self-applied years before had the entire planet’s worth of close acquaintances not already branded me with the “Polish Hammer” appellation.
As far as “One Battle After Another” goes, there was just a silly artificiality about it I couldn’t get past. I just wasn’t entertained. I mistrust the taste of those who say otherwise, and question if they’re opinion isn’t given to be a part of the cool tribe. Five years from now the film will be forgotten, tossed in the dustbin of popular opinion horseshit with the likes of “Shakespeare in Love” and “The Full Monty” and “Life is Beautiful.” Remember that shit?
For my money, “Sinners” was the best movie I watched last year. Visually arresting. And, hell, I could watch Jack O’Connell sing “Rocky Road to Dublin” a million times. Just like I could watch him slaughter Nazis all day long in “Rogue Heroes.”
Anyway, so fucking what? There’s assholes out there who will tell you “The Grinch Who Stole Bitches” was a fine movie with the same lack of shame some jackass will commend “One Battle After Another” for being a culturally relevant movie. That can’t be a viable opinion, can it? I would be willing to bet fifty of my hard-earned dollars that “The Grinch Who Stole Bitches” will come up empty during the Academy Awards season. I will not make the same bet for “One Battle After Another” but they are both equally ridiculous in my eyes. Not as bad as Billy Zane pretending to be Marlon Brando, though. Or The Rock pretending to be anybody.
But what the fuck do I know? As a writer/creator my literary sensibilities probably leans more toward “The Grinch Who Stole Bitches” than “One Battle After Another” so I can’t answer that question with any conviction.
And don’t get me started on music.
Nick Cave had an album released in 2025. It was a concert album. Live God from the tour supporting the best album of 2024, Wild God. So, yeah, Live God was the best album of 2025 and it wasn’t even fucking close.
As far as comic books, you really need to be reading “Department of Truth” and “Ice Cream Man” These are generational books that utterly elevate the artform.
I don’t know. Honestly, I haven’t been impressed with the entirety of this first quarter century of the new millennium.
I suppose I could comment on the sorry state of the world, but I avoid the news at all costs. And my aversion to news media is helped along by my twelve hour a day entrenchment in the factory fracas. It’s easier to lose myself in pop culture ephemeral. Numb my soul with movies, music, and most of all, books.
Sadly, all the books I purchased in 2025, I won’t get around to reading until sometime in 2027. For every book I read that blows my mind wide open, there’s twenty more books surrounding me I’ve yet to read, and that stings.
That said, there is one book I should mention, so I can end this column on less of a bitter whining, and more of a positive note. Though I read it in 2025, the book itself doesn’t release until the first half of 2026. It’s well worth adding to your library. The book I’m referring to is Aleathia Drehmer’s Quiet Underpinnings.
For the past, hell, it’s gotta be going on twenty years now, Aleathia has been writing quietly devastating poetic musings on the nature of relationships with her child, her mom, lovers, the job, her place in the world. She’s become, for me, one of the most inspiring, creative voices in poetry today.
Quiet Underpinnings is Drehmer’s third Roadside Press title following and building upon We Don’t Get to Write the Ending and Little Graveyards. In Quiet Underpinnings, the poems were written and collated according to the Japanese adherence to 72 microseasons, each poem belonging to a microseason, every three poems falling within each of the twenty-four larger seasons. Of course, in Alabama, we have but two seasons (college football season and waiting for college football season) and I don’t like either one of them.
I like and admire Quiet Underpinnings very much. In my own personal poetry, my writing is relegated to narratives usually involving fucking around and finding out and all the silly shit that falls between the fucking around and the finding out. Poetry which I suppose reflects upon my life. Aleathia’s poetry also reflects upon her life experiences, in this instance, how it entwines with her interactions with nature.
What I love best about Aleathia is her ability to write sentimentally without ever becoming mawkish. There’s a refreshing lack of irony. Aleathia doesn’t hide her sensitivity behind an armor of clever word play or poetic tricks. She offers herself up skinless and raw. She’s a woman who loves and craves love and opens her arms to a world that can be all knives sometimes, but she recounts the wounds with the same spirit of indomitable vulnerability as she describes the changing seasons, the flora and fauna, the landscape of her heart superimposed on the landscape of the northeast. The trails and gulleys and creeks and waterfalls she hikes through. There’s even a poem that mentions frisbee golf. And you know what. It was also excellent.
So, keep an eye for Aleathia Drehmer’s Quiet Underpinnings. And while you’re at it, grab a few more Roadside Press titles. You’d be supporting one of the most important small presses operating today.
There you have it. I bet when you started reading this column you had no idea it would end with a review of Aleathia’s latest collection of poetry. That’s because I’m fucking unpredictable. Unlike “One Battle After Another.” I knew how that shit was going to end inside the first five goddam minutes. And Sean Penn wasn’t that good in it. He did a better job than Billy Zane would have, though.
Karl Koweski is a displaced Region Rat now living in rural Alabama. He writes when his pen allows it. He’s a husband to a lovely wife and father to some fantastic kids. He collects pop culture ephemera. On most days he prefers Flash Gordon to Luke Skywalker and Neil Diamond to Elvis Presley.
THE POLISH HAMMER POETRY CORNER is a weekly column, posted each Tuesday morning.
