BOOKS
FUTURE TENSES COMING FROM ALICE JAMES BOOKS IN OCT 2026
In Future Tense, the speaker, after fighting heartbreaking infertility for three years, wrestles with the joy and grief of finally becoming a mother while losing her own.
Future Tense examines the tender and tangled relationship between womanhood and time. This narrative-driven collection chronicles the devastating landscape of infertility: the speaker spends three years failing to conceive while her mother is dying from Stage Four uterine cancer. The collection interrogates the joys and grief of womanhood and motherhood and explores how biology can turn against us, echoing how bodies reflect both punishment and pleasure.
Praise for Future Tense:
“This book is incredibly moving and powerful. It speaks of motherhood, of infertility, of grief, and loss and desire in a very palpable way, making use of space, formal variation, and lyric to indicate time and the textures of emotions faced by the speaker throughout the book. I'm struck by the way in which you approach difficult subject matter like cancer, infertility, loss, and illness in a way that is both personal and universally relevant. It's a book that is very generous toward its readers and welcomes them in with vulnerability and authenticity. These poems are sharp and inspirational even as they tread rocky roads”
—Carey Salerno
Artwork by Lara Zakoul
BOAT BURNED releaseD with by YesYes Books in Jan 2020
When you burn the boats, retreating, is no longer an option. Boat Burned examines the relationships one is forced to vessel, to family, to faith, to femininity; Boat Burned compares the female form to boat. It interrogates the ways we are taught to woman, questions the model that has been passed down, recounts what the body carries and how the body carries us. It asks what happens when you outgrow both the love and loyalties you were raised to obey and set fire to old identities and beliefs.
Boat Burned explores womanhood as an act of urgency, with its own language and law. Through an imperative voice and multiple lenses: woman as boat, woman as math problem, woman as storm, it rocks and sways, as you move through from sea to squall, feeling the ocean still calling in your bones. Boat Burned reminds us that, we each are a piece of every boat we've have built and sank. To build a new name, you must burn another.
Praise for Boat Burned:
In this remarkable inaugural collection of poems, Kelly Grace Thomas reminds us water is where we are from, water is what we are made of, and water is where we’ll return. These formally dexterous poems invite the reader to consider how the craft of a poem is a physical object that helps keep us afloat. Boat Burned interrogates the moment where the embodied spirit butts up against the strictures and violence of an impossible world. This is an urgent new collection from an urgent new voice.
-sam sax, author of Bury It
Get Lit- Words Ignite's first textbook Words Ignite
Words Ignite is a year-long deep dive into writing and performance, approved by the University of California for the classroom. It includes over 100 poems, writing prompts, and exercises, to help you claim, respond, revise, and perform. These are the tools of poetry, and by the end of the book, you’ll have them mastered.
Words Ignite is different from any other class, because you get to choose. You choose the poems you want to read, the topics and themes you want to write about, and how to share each poem with the world.
The world is ready for young voices to come forth and shine.
Praise for Words Ignite:
Beautiful, what a gem! Lovely. Incredible book — needs to be in every room, hope, village, street, café, field, roof, living room, corner, cafeteria and art studio! Still floored and unroofed by this book. — Juan Felipe Herrera, former Poet Laureate of the United States
