Ugly Decade

Auteur

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.

Texte du rabat

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.