Ask Me About the Future

by Rebecca Jessen

Full of zest and flair, Jessen’s poems map constellations of desire, loss and longing. Riffing on the future (which isn’t what it used to be), dating apps, despair, Bonnie Tyler, Taylor Swift and the lesbian Bachelorette, they are set in interstellar queer utopias, maternity wards and single beds. These are poems of sly surprises, radical vulnerability, dark-edged humour and vast originality. Following on from her award-winning verse novel, Gap, this collection confirms Jessen as one of the most engaging and talented writers of her generation.

Genres: Poetry, Lesbian, Queer

96 pages, Paperback

Published March 31, 2020

About the author

Rebecca lives in Brisbane and grew up in South-Western Sydney. She is the award-winning author of verse-novel Gap (UQP 2014). Her debut poetry collection Ask Me About the Future is forthcoming with UQP in 2020.

Rebecca’s writing has been published in Overland, Meanjin, Rabbit Poetry Journal, Going Down Swinging, The Lifted Brow, Cordite Poetry Review, Mascara Literary Review, Tincture Journal, Verity La, Voiceworks and more. She holds a First Class Honours Degree in Creative Writing from QUT.

Rebecca is the winner of the 2015 QLD Premier’s Young Publishers and Writers Award. Her book Gap was shortlisted for the 2015 Sisters In Crime Davitt Award for Best Debut Book. In 2013 Rebecca won the Queensland Literary Award for Best Emerging Author. In 2012 she won the State Library of Queensland Young Writers Award. She is the recipient of an AMP Tomorrow Maker grant.

Reviews

[Shastra Deo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Refiguring what's to come, stretching out towards utopia; always the living, always the love; Bec, yours is the only future in which I want to live.

[Madison Griffiths · Rating 5 out of 5]

When Margaret Preston painted herself in 1930, as commissioned by the Trustees of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, she was thrilled: the redness of her cheeks, the nick in the centre of her chin and her pale, thick eyebrows had never been the subject of her canvas before. She was a flower painter—not a flower, she insisted, somebody who reproduces beauty, not beauty itself. The novelty of gazing—of reconsidering her own flesh as ‘art’, as something worth reproducing with oils and turpentines—excited her.

It’s this that Rebecca Jessen cleverly appropriates in her latest poetry collection, Ask Me About the Future, which opens with a poem aptly titled Self Portrait 2017: a cheeky take on Preston’s process of looking, of really seeing oneself, and then being an agent in how that self is rendered. I am queer—I am not yet here, Jessen reminds us. It is an intrinsically queer burden: that is, being able to properly make sense of oneself in a world that doesn’t exist yet, because the current one incessantly tells you that you are wrong, or—if not wrong—just not real. And Jessen flirts with the idea that perhaps she is fully-formed, fully here, fully queer, but what does that look like?

The ‘future’—as elusive as it seems—promised the liberation of the LGBTQI+ community years ago, but failed to say how or when it would start. Destiny will be our guide, Jessen declares in a poem about a queer-occupied spacecraft called Destiny, a vehicle fitted out with a large disco ball and strobe lights, which floats through space in the summer of 3018. But as jocular as Jessen’s writing may sometimes be, and often is, laced in her collection is a unique kind of sorrow. This ache may not be obvious to those who don’t necessarily see the past through tomorrow, and by that I mean, those who aren’t part of the LGBTQI+ community. But Jessen isn’t writing for anyone else: she knows the struggle, knows that with every rainbow flag comes a hate crime, a plebiscite, a vulgar remark.

Rebecca Jessen’s ‘Ask Me About the Future’ is something valiant, and yet humble: a gentle and compelling deep dive into what it means to occupy the world as a queer person, from the tender domesticity of birthing suites and hometowns, to living amidst a state-sanctioned circus, Jessen engineers a new, queer home in her pages. Just for us.

[B.P. Marshall · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved AMATF. I entered this work, tentative and unsure, feeling like some generous kind person had just thrown open the door on their lives, and let me wander around, looking at their ornaments and bookshelf. I felt a respect and reciprocity for this level of open honesty, something I'll never match. Entree to another life! And one so different, in some ways, to mine.

But, there they were, moments I got. Moments that made me laugh and connect. Moments that make up a life. Moments I felt, and which resonated, surprisingly strongly, to moments in my own life. Moments that kicked in with genuine emotion.

I'll never be a poet, but I have enormous respect and regard for those word-wranglers who go way deeper than I do in shining a light on their own lived experience to show us another way to be, to think, to feel. An emotional journey. Loved the smiles, loved it all. Thank you.

[Julia Gorst · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Lesbian Bachelorette is the best poem ever written.

[beth · Rating 3 out of 5]

it was entertaining!

[Kathy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't know a lot about poetry (I don't even pretend to know a lot) but I know what I like and. This. I. Like. I get it. "Ask Me About the Future" feels comfortable and familiar, and yet it takes me by surprise. It takes my breath away because it is honest and tender "I think of sliding the shirt off its wooden hanger and bringing it to my face ..." and I am not at all prepared for the end by the time I reach the last page.
(I love the cover! Congrats to the designer. It is gorgeous.)

[Zenobia Frost · Rating 5 out of 5]

To draw a review entirely from @AskMe_Oracle twitterbot quotes, "In Australia, the poet will illuminate loneliness" / "the girls will feed the eclipse" / "your work will moisten the full moon" / and "in your history, time travel will improve tomorrow".

[Georgia Hansard · Rating 3 out of 5]

3/5
"Write yourself gently
into 2000 years' time
where maybe one day someone will find these thoughts
archived in the museum of earthy frights
where you are a sequel
a 2.0 version of your self
and the people who once knew you
will look back and say
nothing beats the original
but I like you better this way"

[Abigail Gray · Rating 4 out of 5]

My first ever poetry book experience!

I was lucky enough to be in Melbourne during the Aesop queer library event, and this was the book I decided to pick up. Thought I would give poetry a proper chance as I've been enjoying it more recently, and I enjoyed it more than I expected I would!

It was a quick read for me, that I read on the plane up to Cairns. Tried to savour it and take my time so I did by best, and folded down the corners of pages of the poems I really enjoyed and would like to revisit. A couple of them were a little bit too out-there for me, but some of them were really wholesome and made me understand better why people would read poetry books / collections.

[Kristin · Rating 2 out of 5]

An evocative collection of queer poetry, about lived experience and hypothetical futures. A deep dive into what it is to be human, to exist as queer, to have mental health struggles. Her words ache tenderly.

[Blair · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quite fun in places and I liked some of the poems but it felt a bit mixed.

[chloe · Rating 3 out of 5]

i liked the lesbian bachelorette

[Courtney · Rating 4 out of 5]

Accessible, queer poetry. I was delighted by the index poem.

[Taz · Rating 1 out of 5]

i found this terribly uninteresting but i’m sure it was cathartic for the author to poem out their mental illness and queerness

[josh]

writing bad and thoughtlessly self-indulgent poetry with a semi-adequate understanding of rhythm and form is an act of queer transcendence actually

[katnancy · Rating 4 out of 5]

had me laffin at the busstop