The Future

Emerging from a culture where the collective political outlook oscillates between outright denial and environmental fatalism, Monica Ferrell’s third collection of poetry is refreshingly lucid, grounded in the simultaneously ornate and ordinary anxieties of now while squaring up to the vast obscurity of what comes next. At once irreverent yet elegant, sophisticated yet accessible, relatable yet transcendent, these poems capture the difficult balance of parenting (or simply functioning) in the 21st century without losing sight of their place in history. This speaker dextrously connects “The Slow Parade” of the past — those ”hundreds of thousands of years / On the march, / Fiddling with the bone // Arrowhead and awl” — to the urgent excess of today as the perpetual race of mass-production plies us with microcontaminants until, like “[her] girl’s Polly Pocket” and its wardrobe of “polyamorous / Polyethylene,” we are “made of plastic: / Plastic eyes, / Plastic throat, // Plastic ovaries.” To quote the praise of Maggie Millner, “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…an absurd, primal urge to stick around.” Inspecting the immense legacy of myth in “Life of Mary,” Ferrell considers divine tradition in an earthly light, the diminutive origins of the spectacular, the truth that Mary’s story was not exceptional so much as emblematic of the routine miracle repeating since time immemorial. “What begins: everything. Size of a crumb, / indiscriminate bundle of cells. It’s / a barnacle with a dream inside.” 

​​​​In tender, vulnerable, and mordantly funny poems, The Future confronts the nature of time, both the relatively brief scale of one person’s life and the longer ones of planet and species. Passing through vast eras as it moves from Neanderthals and ice ages to Ozempic and chatbots, the book remains nevertheless resolutely intimate and personal, especially about the experience of motherhood, how the future keeps finding a way of breaking through. Like matter meeting antimatter, these poems reconcile the opposing forces of overdetermination and enigma driving the times to come: because everything that will become the future is already in play right now, we know the future, and still it is by definition inchoate, the derivative of all that we cannot yet know. 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 another, reminding us of the genesis contained inside obliteration: one November night // I too once opened my eyes / to the bright.”