Future Tense

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.