Annihilated Time

In Annihilated Time, Jeff Derksen offers a clear point of view from which to critique and unsettle contemporary neoliberalism and its slippery redeployments of democratic vocabularies for undemocratic ends.

By recognizing the range of scales羅local, national, and global羅through which neoliberalism operates, and the contradictory interactions of the same or related gestures depending on the scale at which one reads, Derksen suggests that it is through a multivalenced poetics of space, movement, and reflexivity that readers and writers resist and thrive. These are smart, thoughtful essays that offer a wide range of opportunities to help the justice-minded to productively refuse or rearticulate rapidly shifting forms of power for more open and liberatory movements.羅Larissa Lai, University of British Columbia, author of Saltfish Girl

In this long-awaited collection of essays, Jeff Derksen explores the new pressures placed on poetry, art, and theory by the intensified intimacy between culture and economics in the "long neoliberal moment," with great intelligence and ironic humour. Drawing on live debates and controversies--as opposed to isolated theories or static models羅in disciplines ranging from Marxist geography to postmodern architecture, Derksen raises the question of what it means to make art in the present moment in a new and exciting way.羅Sianne Ngai, University of California at Los Angeles, author of Ugly Feelings

Just as Charles Olson turned to geographer Carl Sauer to pry open the field of contemporary poetry and poetics in the previous century, Jeff Derksen here brilliantly relates poetry ("that underachieving commodity") to architecture, and explores the uneven development of contested urban territories in the work of Marxist geographers. Derksen's incisive critiques of the lengthy spectre of neoliberalism that is haunting our globe seek to create not only new readers of poetry but new forms of and spaces for a re-scaled, re-envisioned, and re-invigorated cultural citizenship. Annihilated Time deserves to be read as it was written: boldly and widely.羅Mark Nowak, editor of XCP: Cress Cultural Poetics, author of Coal Mountain Elementary