The Future (Paperback)

The Future is a book about time. The tender, vulnerable, and bitingly funny poems of Monica Ferrell's third collection confront the hours as they stream by, our relatively brief lives that feel so long while we are living them, successive generations and the unwinding story of our species, and the bewilderingly vast geological age of the planet. Traveling across eras, through ice ages to the eighteenth century and the modern day of Ozempic and chatbots, these poems also square up to the obscurity of what comes next as they peer forward into time still to come.

At once irreverent yet elegant, sophisticated yet conversational, these poems capture what it means to get by day to day in a 21st century destabilized by ecological collapse, political havoc, and the incursion of technology into our most private and intimate spaces. “Every day I wake up,” Ferrell writes, “and ask, is it today? The volcano?” Restless in their imaginative scope, these poems leap across the world, from the enduring statues at Angkor Wat and Hampi to Alpine meadows contaminated with plastic to a supermarket in Vermont. Without papering over any of the difficulties we face today, Ferrell nonetheless expands our capacity to wonder, especially about the experience of motherhood, how the future keeps finding a way of breaking through.

This book manifests as that impossible, unimaginable collision that annihilates the world as we thought it was and sees it emerge as pure energy. Ferrell includes us in “the bequest of this battered planet, this sweetly belabored thing,” from one generation to the next, reminding us of the genesis contained inside obliteration: “one November night I too once opened my eyes to the bright.” 

Monica Ferrell is the author of a novel and three books of poetry, including You Darling Thing (2018), a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and the Believer Book Award in Poetry, and Beasts for the Chase (2008), winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize and finalist for the Asian American Writers Workshop Prize in Poetry. Born in New Delhi, she lives in Vermont.