FUTURE TENSE
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.
Future Tense is forthcoming from Alice James Books in 2026.
boat burned
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. 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 reminds us that we each are a piece of every boat we've built and sank. To build a new name, you must burn another.
Boat Burned was published by YesYes Books in 2020.
PRAISE FOR KELLY GRACE THOMAS…
“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, national book award nominee
“Tendertangle—I love when a book makes a new word like Kelly Grace Thomas does here in Boat Burned. A tendertangle, a lush portmanteau, is how I drank and devoured these water-drenched poems. This mercy-hearted work shows great concern and empathy for the twisted mess and mass of bodies—bodies as boats, bodies burning, body as a window, the lover’s body, and the parental body as a woven elegy and ode. This gorgeous debut is a sustained symphonic metaphor on what we carry in our vessels, all the damage and joy (inherited and otherwise) sailing and sinking and singing through magnificent verse. Thomas is a master of intense precision of feeling. The diction is hungry and barking “for anything to love us back.” I am beyond excited for this brilliant and beautiful collection.”
— Tiana Clark, Author of scorched earth
“‘History is a dirty / ocean. And I am dangerous / with thirst,’ says luminous poet Kelly Grace Thomas in her spellbinding Boat Burned. The gorgeous poems that populate this powerful collection ‘rise // fully formed from sea.’ These are elegant, crisp, clear and potent poems that tackle such issues as impossible beauty standards, eating disorders, racist attitudes in the U.S., divorce and family trauma, all while binding a thickly knotted rope of love between the speaker and her family, the speaker and the world around her. The sea-salted and boat-burned voice of this speaker sings clear as a prophetess all that is painful for women in this society, and all that is possible. She suggests we, ‘1) Give back the rib 2) Eat every apple / until [we] are fat with orchards 3) Dress / in snake and dig a grave.’ And while the speaker asserts, ‘I don't like asking to be fed,’ this collection offers much sustenance to carry away long after we’ve read the final page.”