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9781961897823

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""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

Author Information

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.

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