Kelly Grace Thomas Makes Poetry a Page-Turner in Future Tense

Poet Kelly Grace Thomas set out to write the one thing poetry collections are rarely called: a page-turner. Her second collection, Future Tense — a memoir in verse available from Alice James Books — documents the three years she spent fighting to become a mother while losing her own, ending with her daughter's adoption shortly before her mother's death.

Because life was changing "minute by minute, diagnosis by diagnosis," Thomas writes, the book could unfold that way too. Her aim was momentum: readers should look up and realize they have "devoured fifty pages of poetry."

What makes a story worth following?

Story, Thomas argues, is what sticks — the architecture of desire, obstacle and stake. She points to Edgar Kunz's Fixer and Sharon Olds's Stag's Leap as collections that anchor the reader in a specific event, then show the speaker navigating and changing.

In Future Tense, the opening poem "A Maybe, A Yes, a Not" drops the reader in medias res: "The gaps. I measure. I math. Worn by the wait." The poem "Late" shows her mother, newly moved from New Jersey to California, ending on the line: "Does the future ever arrive in the dress we pick out?" Two poems later, the mother receives a Stage Four cancer diagnosis.

Two conflicts run at once, leaving the question that becomes the book's spine: will the speaker become a mother before her mother dies?

How do you build a book that moves?

Structure can make a collection feel "both innovative and inevitable." Thomas cites Victoria Chang's Obit, where every poem is an obituary; Caitlin Conlon's Burning the Ghostlight, written as a four-act play; and Matt Rasmussen's Black Aperture, where the speaker relives the day after his brother's suicide from different angles.

Future Tense follows a three-act narrative. Thomas needed an inciting incident — "a one-way door the speaker walks through" — plus rising conflict and propulsion, pairing apparent resolutions with deeper complications. Each section begins and ends on a cliffhanger and is named for a measurement of time: Six Months In, One Year In, Two Years In. Time becomes a countdown, and an antagonist.

What can be lost — and what are you withholding?

Drawing on Donald Maass's Writing the Breakout Novel, which argues a book needs conflict on every page, Thomas insists each poem carry consequence. She tracked every storyline in a spreadsheet: each character's arc, when information was revealed, where emotional peaks landed.

The stakes compound: a mother with Stage Four cancer whose dying wish is grand motherhood; a marriage unraveling under infertility; costs running to "$50K later / $100K later." The title poem asks not simply whether the speaker becomes a mother, but what it costs her: "The cost of anything is how long you'll wait." The second section ends with "Year of Thirst" — "I'm moving forward with adoption…With or without you" — and a river forking: "No telling if it will find itself again."

Tension can come through form as well. In "What I Wish I Could Say to My Daughter's Birthmom," strike-throughs show hesitation: "So grateful (jealous) of one another's luck." Interiority does the rest — waiting rooms, bedrooms, and "the silences where the hardest things couldn't be said."

What has changed by the end?

Thomas invokes Vivian Gornick: a narrator must "make the piece arrive" and "bring us out into a clearing where the sense of things is larger than it was before." Images must take on new meaning. The ocean means isolation in "Infertility" — "I drown inside / my tiny boat" — until, in "Dearest Everything," at the birth of her daughter: "Now, I understand every sea / we needed to cross to call you home."

What does this change for poetry? Thomas's claim, tested across the collection, is that genre does not define momentum — a book of poems can carry a reader on stakes, structure and withholding. Whether more poets follow the spreadsheet-and-cliffhanger method remains to be seen.