Being a student of Monica Ferrell’s was a singularly influential time in my life. Immediately upon meeting her, I wanted to be like her: to enter a room with the same serious allure, the same unassuming self-possession. And when I first read her poems—fierce, sophisticated, sensual in every sense of the word—I didn’t want to write poems like them; I wanted to have written them myself.

Now, instead of envy, I’m overwhelmed with gratitude for her new book, The Future , which continues to teach me how we can maintain an urbane, old-soul sensibility in the mundane horror of the new world order.…