I'm Looking Forward to Hearing Back from You

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 poet, critic, and professor who lives in Vancouver and Vienna. His poetry books include The Vestiges, Transnational Muscle Cars, and Down Time (Winner of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize). His critical books include After Euphoria, Annihilated Time: Poetry and Other Politics, and the folio How High is the City, How Deep is Our Love. He works on artistic research projects with the collective Urban Subjects: their books include The Militant Image Reader, Momentarily: Learning from Mega Events, and Autogestion: Henri Lefebvre in New Belgrade. As curators, they brought The Vienna Model: Housing for the 21st Century to the Museum of Vancouver and curated the exhibition If Time Is Still Alive at Camera Austria. He was a founding member of both the Kootenay School of Writing and Artspeak Gallery. Derksen works at Simon Fraser University and is a Fulbright Fellow and former research fellow at the Centre for Place, Culture, and Politics at The Graduate Center, CUNY. He lives in Vancouver and Vienna.