It sounds like a joke, but it's not: the most honest, hell-bent and experimental voices of 2025 are not to be found in the bookstore. They can be found in vertical videos featuring lo-fi beats and a 22-year-old reading poetry into his phone.
One star
Two stars
Three stars
Fours stars
Five stars
Disclaimer: Apropos Magazine received access or a review copy. As always, we share our own impressions — unfiltered.
Six stars
Yeah, we said it. TikTok -- the platform that gave us dancing dentists and “how to make feta pasta” -- is now also home to young poets, essayists and writing outsiders who can't be bothered to wait for Gyldendal's blessing. They write in the comments. They perform in bed. They publish themselves and they gain followers, likes and a direct connection with their audience.
Welcome to the post-literary age where you don't need a publisher -- just your voice and an algorithm that's customarily convoluted to serve you to the right person.
Poetry in pajamas and three seconds of reading time
It often starts with a simple image: A notepad, a cup of coffee, a face in semi-darkness. The voice reads out -- not because anyone asked them to, but because they couldn't help but. There is anger, vulnerability, satire, girlfriend grief and crisis of existence. Not wrapped up. Not processed into “lecture-ready prose”. Just raw and honest.
We've seen videos featuring poems about placentas, rejected tinder dates, and one that spent the entire format shouting “I'm not done loving you!” to an empty space. Is it any good? Sometimes not. But it's vibrant. And that's more than can be said for much of what's on the shelves in the supermarket's book department.
Where did the experiments actually go?
If you ask the publishing world, all this is probably still perceived as a digital sideshow. Something you might have to use as PR -- but not take seriously as literature. But why really? Hasn't literature always been carried by those who refused to fit in? Have we forgotten that the beat poets were anarchists and that autofiction was once a threat to the “purity” of literature?
The TikTok poets are following in the same footsteps. They use the pace and aesthetics of the platform to play with the form. Poems that consist of one line. Essays that are clipped together like a music video nightmare. Commentary tracks where people build on the text in realtime. It sure as hell is avant-garde -- whether or not it smacks of hashtags and algorithm-friendly desperation.
Is it superficial? Well, maybe. Is it literature? Yes.
It takes courage to put yourself out there. Not in essays with headings like “Life in Three Chapters,” but in 27 seconds, where one just... is. TikTok removes the filter between sender and recipient. It is diary, manifesto and literary performance all in one. And yes, of course there are a lot of bras. But there are also pearls. And they get there. Not because anyone approves of them. But because someone notices them.
In reality...
TikTok may not be the answer to the future of literature, but it is a platform where the future is already writing. We can choose to dismiss it as noise. Or we can listen. Maybe there's something in those 22 seconds of a poem about growing up without a language for what you feel. Maybe that's where literature lives — right now. In vertical format, with typos and all.
