coming March 2026
Advance praise for The Future:
“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
“‘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
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
published September 2018
About You Darling Thing:
“This lively, subversive book is fascinated by questions of feminism and femininity — womanhood as it is lived, and as it is socially constructed.”
“This new collection from the award-winning Ferrell ( Beasts for the Chase) opens with “The Date,” but the young women parading through its lines are “gloved & blind-/folded.” Clearly, Ferrell’s exploration throughout of love and marriage is going to be anything but sentimental. An eponymous savage bride proclaims, “You need me like ice needs the mountain,” passion’s on-the-edge riskiness is summed by the line, “Every sixteen-year-old girl likes// A murderer for an admirer,” and “You are sexier that anyone I’ve ever met” opens the poem “Oh You Absolute Darling,” a phrase muttered by Anna Karenina’s Count Vronsky to his horse—but the horse ended up dead. “I don’t mind living alone” proclaims one speaker, but that’s hard in a dark world defined by “The inventions of lust, the pageantry of what.” Another poem prevaricates: “There is nothing beautiful here/ However I may want it.”
VERDICT Eerie, otherworldly, and enthrallingly dangerous, this smart, disquieting collection should be handed to sophisticated readers. ”
“In this long-anticipated follow-up to 2008’s Beasts for the Chase, Ferrell renders familiar literary tropes suddenly new, surprising, and dangerous again. Presented as an extended sequence of spare, self-contained persona pieces, this collection culls text, imagery, and inspiration from numerous works of art, situating an array of historical references within a decidedly postmodern philosophical terrain. Indeed, the heroines of these vibrant lyrics frequently court danger amidst the ornamentation that surrounds them. For example, Ferrell writes in “Glacier,” “Every sixteen-year-old girl likes/ A murderer for an admirer, his eyes on her from the hotel’s// Third-floor balcony as she lugs her skis from the slope.” Here, “astonishingly exact” rules of decorum and décor give rise to boredom and, in the end, self-destructive impulses. The poem’s neat couplets, and Ferrell’s subtle departures from this familiar form, speak to these questions of containment, especially when considering women’s voices and lived experiences. As the collection unfolds, Ferrell uses other forms derived from a predominantly male artistic tradition to convey a sense of female ennui. She elaborates, “Somewhere a mutiny is tearing loose from/ Its tree like ripe fruit;// But as for now, little boarder, orphan, we’re here in this pavilion/ Briefly.” Throughout this striking collection, Ferrell balances elegance and chaos, beauty and urgency, lyricism with a veiled threat. ”