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.

(From Talonbooks)

Future Works is available in April 2025.

Jeff Derksen is a poet, critic and professor at Simon Fraser University who divides his time between Vancouver and Vienna. He is the author of poetry books The Vestiges, Transnational Muscle Cars and Down Time, which won the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, and the critical books After Euphoria, Annihilated Time: Poetry and Other Politics. He collaborates on artistic research projects with the collective Urban Subjects and was a founding member of both the Kootenay School of Writing and Artspeak Gallery. He is a Fulbright Fellow and a former research fellow at the Centre for Place, Culture and Politics at The Graduate Center, CUNY.