Future Tense - by Kelly Grace Thomas (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Reckoning with infertility, adoption, and love under pressure, Kelly Grace Thomas's Future Tense is a searing memoir-in-verse about a woman's fight to become a mother while losing her own.

Thomas spends three years trying for a child who never arrives. As she struggles with infertility, her mother is dying of Stage IV uterine cancer, and the desire for a child turns urgent--a countdown. As her mother's health deteriorates, time narrows, pressure builds, and the clock refuses to slow. As her marriage strains and the world remakes itself without her, Thomas refuses to give up. The fertility clinic is the coldest place on earth; still, she keeps going--through years of medical gaslighting, IVF consults, mounting debt, and backhanded blame--finally welcoming her daughter through adoption just months before her mother's death.

Intimate and unflinching, Future Tense interrogates the intertwined joys and griefs of womanhood and motherhood--and how biology can sometimes turn against us. Thomas approaches illness and loss with clarity and care, writing with a generosity that welcomes readers in. Despite their brevity, these poems refuse despair, finding meaning and connection even in the hardest seasons of life.

Review Quotes

"Future Tense is a thoughtful, beautiful meditation on the slow, aching, and sometimes miraculous state of intertwined grief--in a manner that is not only about sadness, but also, through its rich imagery and world-building, asks a reader to consider what they love, what they have, perhaps, taken for granted, and how to adjust the arc of their own universe."
--Hanif Abdurraqib, author of There's Always This Year

"Future Tense is memoir-in-verse gifting us ample permutations of longing. Kelly Grace Thomas charts the overlap (both temporal and metaphorical) of her mother's death and trying for a child. True to the title, tension lights up this collection. In eclectic structures, whether careful tercets or sprawling fragments, Thomas ricochets between loss and desire until they blend. When it comes to the myriad expectations and stigmas placed on the infertile body, Thomas is willing to lay so much bare for us, unflinchingly charting desperation and the cost of wanting."
--Shira Erlichman, author of Odes to Lithium

"In Future Tense, Kelly Grace Thomas writes from the long middle of wanting, where time stretches and the body becomes both witness and question. Hope sharpens and exhausts. The future feels like something that keeps receding, leaving the speaker to ask, "Is there a name / for grieving / what won't / come? As the collection unfolds, Future Tense learns how deeply love is entangled with endurance. The poems widen to hold grief and arrival in the same hands, writing toward care, astonishment, and gratitude, the wisdom of waiting and loss."
--Diannely Antigua, author of Good Monster

"Kelly's writing is the kind of work I absolutely love--craft-conscious and engaging, emotional and real, without ever sacrificing meaning. I think any of you reading this could pick up one of Kelly's poems and find your heart somewhere inside of it."
--Caitlin Conlon, Dancing with the Magnolia

"Kelly Grace Thomas's Future Tense asks questions about how we build families--and, importantly, why--looking directly at what happens when culturally ingrained narratives of domestic 'success' break down. As they reckon with infertility--a deep, unrequited desire to have a child--and, in parallel time, the death of the poet's mother from cancer, these poems confront the fragility of life, strange biological realities, and what can and can't be controlled. Unsentimental, lyrically honest, and dialed into the complexities of grief, these poems destigmatize that which is most fraught about our bodies. They construct a world in which a so-called 'failure' to create new life activates a creative impulse strong enough to make life new."
--Jane Huffman, author of Public Abstract

About the Author

Kelly Grace Thomas is a poet, writer, coach, and ocean-obsessed Aries from Jersey. She is the author of Future Tense (forthcoming from Alice James Books, 2026) and Boat Burned (YesYes Books, 2020). She has won the Jane Underwood Poetry Prize and the Neil Postman Award for Metaphor. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Sun, The Adroit Journal, 32 Poems, Los Angeles Review, Sixth Finch, and elsewhere. Kelly has received fellowships from the Martha's Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing and the Kenyon Review Young Writers' Workshop. She is also co-author of poetry curricula, including Voices in Verse: Poetry, Identity, and Ethnic Studies, Stanzas of America: Celebrating BIPOC Poetry, and Words Ignite: Explore, Write, and Perform Classic and Spoken Word Poetry (Get Lit), which are currently taught in the Los Angeles Unified School District. She was a Blackburn Fellow at Randolph College, where she earned her MFA. Kelly lives in Benicia, California, where she is working on her debut novel and coaching writers online.