Future Works grapples with time, asking how to fully live in the present while also imagining possible futures. Written over a broken decade shaped by the implosion of the social promises of the past, Future Works is a funny, angry, and moving book about human and more-than-human labour, cities and trees, extractive economies, and the possibilities of decolonizing temporalities and building a shared futurity. Both sly and sincere, and driven by militant joy, these varied poems range across the uneven geographies of the present. Through the language of expectation, Future Works resonates with an unexpected optimism born out of uncanny solidarities and encounters, mutual aid, and the music of possibility.

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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