Future Works grapples with time, asking how to fully live with the present while also being attentive to possible futures and to the lost temporalities buried within the now. It was written haltingly over a decade shaped and troubled by climate change and environmental collapse, the global rise of populist fascism, an invigorated politics of bodily control (biopolitics), mass forced displacement of people, increasing disparities in wealth and resources, and a general understanding that daily life is getting meaner, unsustainably expensive, and generally shitty. Yet underneath this manure, very strong buds have tried to push through – mutual care, deeper social justice, an ethos of living more and working less, environmental action, and more ethical ways of being. This book is about trying to live through the last ugly decade. It’s an angry-funny book about cities and trees, about human and more-than-human labour, about decolonizing temporalities, and about futurity.

Jeff Derksen is a founding member of Vancouver’s writer-run centre, the Kootenay School of Writing, and worked as an editor of Writing magazine. His work has been anthologized in East of Main and Verse: Postmodern Poetry and Language Writing. As an editor, Derksen also organized “Disgust and Overdetermination: a poetics issue,” for Open Letter and “Poetry and the Long Neoliberal Moment” for West Coast Line. Derksen’s poetry and critical writing on art, urbanism and text have been published in Europe and North America. Formerly a research fellow at the Center for Place, Culture and Politics at the City University of New York, he currently works in the English Department at Simon Fraser University. He collaborates on visual art and research projects (focusing on urban issues) with the research collective Urban Subjects. Derksen’s Down Time won the 1991 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Award at the BC Book Prizes. A selection from Dwell — “Host Nation, Host Society”—was nominated for inclusion in The Gertrude Stein Anthology of Innovative North American Poetry: 1993.

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