West Coast poet Jeff Derksen is a leading critic of the relationship between neoliberalism and culture and literature in Canada, but his engagement with neoliberalism extends to his creative work as well, particularly his 2003 poetry collection Transnational Muscle Cars. Drawing on examples from across the range of the collection, this article examines how—for all its hyper-referential elusiveness, ambivalence, and ambiguity—a key part of the texture of Transnational Muscle Cars is an incisive grappling with the economic, political, cultural and existential dimensions of the neoliberal order.
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