Future Tense - Paperback

by Kelly Grace Thomas (Author)

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.

Author Biography

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.