A Review of Dear Future by Jennifer Richter

In Jennifer Richter’s clever and compelling Dear Future, the speaker endeavors to make peace with uncertainty, even as she acknowledges the near impossibility of the task. A friend recovers from emergency brain surgery “surrounded by / beloveds repeating the / word fine” and we wonder if the repetition is to comfort the friend or convince the beloveds. A son with depression keeps to his room, its door ajar, and his mother “watch[es] that silence for his shadow’s drift.” And the speaker thinks frequently of seismologist Charles Richter who created not an earthquake forecasting tool but one to quantify earthquake magnitude—the force of the waves as they heave through the ground. In “Elegy with Aftershocks, Late and Soon” the speaker tells us:

Some believe the earth is a big body
that shakes sometimes like ours with
fever or seizure or the rare tremor of
its heart we think we can predict we
think we can prepare but in the end
it’s the body that decides

If, like the speaker, we want to make peace with uncertainty, this is how to do it: not by anticipating and bracing for every eventuality but by accepting our relative lack of control. Sometimes the earth shakes beneath us. Sometimes our bodies stop working as we want them to. Kids cry when they’re dropped off at daycare; kids leave for college and their parents are left baffled. So often we lack the ability to choose our own circumstances.

This is the experience of anxiety—jumbled thoughts that just keep coming.

Which isn’t to say we are powerless. In “Erasing ‘The Really Big One’ (My Therapist Suggests I Practice Reframing),” Richter uses as source material an article about possible massive earthquakes in the Pacific Northwest, where she lives. In her erasure of the text, she works backwards, beginning her piece with the last line of the article—a way to “reverse the article’s powerful spell,” as she explains in the book’s notes.

The resulting poem is divided into sections, each one titled for one of the Richter Scale magnitude values. The section “5.0-5.9: Moderate,” in its entirety:

When/
if it happens:

a long, suspended, what-was-that moment
(no early warning,
a sudden jolt
radiating outward)
will be the first sign
of

love,

too.

The speaker isn’t reframing her knowledge of earthquakes—she knows that the Cascadia subduction zone will at some point erupt, and with ferocity. Instead, she is reconsidering her understanding of the unknown and reminding herself that “a sudden jolt / radiating outward” can be one of joy. We can find ourselves shocked by beauty or love.

And love is throughout this collection, most notably in the tenderness of a mother toward her two young adult children—a parent who thinks often about their sadness, about their guardedness and vulnerability, and whether a slowdown in texted cat memes signals that they’re in trouble.

The book-opening meme poem, “Trending: Seismologist Explains How to Make an Earthquake Early Warning System with Cats,” is the ideal introduction to how Richter works throughout the collection. As do many of the pieces, this one lacks punctuation—a choice that creates a warm informality but also a bit of confusion and sense of inundation. This is the experience of anxiety—jumbled thoughts that just keep coming. But Richter counters the breathlessness by lavishing her attention on small, real things. That attention (in this case, to cat photos: “show-posed golden / Persian someone had captioned yo for real this / cat looks like the grandfather of a croissant”) is a comfort. It is an irreverent, imperfect form of mindfulness that settles both speaker and reader. That pastry-ed golden Persian? A little jolt of joy, radiating outward.

It’s also part of the compassionate record the speaker is creating. Like the seismologist Richter, the poet Richter is measuring what shakes us. Measuring and documenting it in a way that validates, saying, Yes, I felt that too. Saying, Let’s write it down and then keep going.