Future Tense - by Kelly Grace Thomas (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

In Future Tense, the speaker, after fighting heartbreaking infertility for three years, wrestles with the joy and grief of finally becoming a mother while losing her own.

Future Tense examines the tender and tangled relationships between womanhood, motherhood, and time. Narrative in scope and intimate in tone, the collection chronicles the devastating landscape of infertility: as the speaker undergoes fertility treatment and begins the adoption process, her mother faces treatment for stage four uterine cancer.

Interrogating 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 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

"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.