Shelving the Future

Shelving the Future is a one-of-a-kind poetic anthology—an imaginative chorus of literary voices, both real and reimagined, retelling the same story through different tongues: the future belongs not to the noisemakers, but to the arrangers. Inspired by Rodríguez’s original poem “The Librarians of the Future,” this groundbreaking collection features tributes written in the imagined styles of over 90 poets, from Homer to Hughes, Dickinson to Dove, Rumi to Rich.
Each poem honors the unsung architect of meaning—the archivist, the librarian, the one who places rather than invents. These are odes to the silent resistors of chaos, to those who organize memory, arrange knowledge, and preserve the wisdom of ages so that tomorrow might have a map.
More than a book of poems, Shelving the Future is a literary act of preservation and resistance. It challenges our obsession with novelty and reminds us that the real wealth of the future is not what’s new—but what’s been remembered, restored, and re-placed.
If you’ve ever felt the sacred weight of a well-ordered thought, this book was written for you.