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."
About the Author :
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.
Review :
"Every word of writing is a form of goodbye," writes Monica Ferrell in her virtuosic third book of poems, The Future. With erudition and dazzling mischief, Ferrell reckons with nothing less than history and bids farewell to the history of great men and great art and great omissions. This book isn't merely critique or interrogation but a lyric reinvention of the past, wherein domesticity and cosmopolitanism join forces to reveal the weirdness of history and the weirdness of being human. If the brain is "a place for dreaming," so, too, is this book. By wrangling with our timeworn past and present, Monica Ferrell dreams for us the future, making a radiant music out of the boisterous collision of ideas. The Future is visionary and masterful, and it is the future we've all been hoping for.
--Jennifer Chang
I'm startled by the breadth of this book, by its scope and its scale. In Monica Ferrell's sweeping vision, ancient eons pass through quotidian modernity and out again into the farthest reaches of space and time, from the halls of the Neanderthals to the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade to the unwritten ice ages of a future human epoch. Ferrell's language is ingenious in its juxtapositions of phrase, image, and subject, taking turns at once radical and revelatory. Here, we learn, "The future has a past with lichens and moss, / Nutcrackers, rusted cannons, and beer; / The past is a place where the moon dips / Her face and tries her hardest not to sneer." I am thrilled by the pasts, the presents, and the expansive futures written into these poems, and I am grateful for them.
--Jaswinder Bolina
This book depicts the unfathomable contours of time better than any other I know. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, we're told--and in poem after poem, Monica Ferrell brilliantly shows how each life contains in miniature the whole history of humankind, from the origin of our species to the civilizational extinction we live in fear of. Along the way, upwellings of love and awe--for our children, our lovers, and the great works of art that have shaped us--testify to an absurd, primal urge to stick around. The Future is a masterful and ambitious collection by one of our shrewdest poets.
--Maggie Millner
