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An art book that combines typographic design and poetic-erasure technique to address complex issues of race in Western pulp novels. Second edition revised by the author.
A propos de l'auteur
Jordan Abel is a Nisg¿a'a writer from Vancouver. He is the author of
The Place of Scraps,
Un/inhabited, and
Injun.
His debut,
The Place of Scraps (Talonbooks, 2013), received the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award.
Injun was awarded the Griffin Poetry Prize.
Abel has served as editor for
Poetry Is Dead and as poetry editor for
PRISM international and
Geist. He holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia and a BA from the University of Alberta. His writing has appeared in journals and magazines across Canada, including
CV2,
The Capilano Review,
Prairie Fire,
dANDelion,
ARC Poetry Magazine,
Descant,
Broken Pencil,
OCW Magazine,
filling Station,
Grain, and
Canadian Literature. He is also the author of the chapbooks
Scientia and
Injun, published by above/ground press and JackPine Press, respectively.
Résumé
This is the second edition of award-winning Nisga’a poet Jordan Abel’s second collection of poetry, Un/inhabited, which maps the terrain of the public domain to create a layered investigation of the interconnections between language and land.
Abel constructed the book’s source text by compiling ninety-one complete western novels found on Project Gutenberg, an online archive of public domain works. Using his word processor’s Ctrl+F function, he searched the document in its totality for words that relate to the political and social aspects of land, territory, and ownership. Each search query represents a study in context (How was this word deployed? What surrounded it? What is left over once that word is removed?) that accumulates toward a representation of the public domain as a discoverable and inhabitable body of land.
Featuring essays by Project Space founder Tracy Stefanucci and independent curator Kathleen Ritter – the first pieces of scholarship on Abel’s work – Un/inhabited reminds us of the power of language as material and invites us to reflect on what is present when we see nothing.
