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.
Long-listed 2015 One of 15 best CanLit covers of 2015 (CBC Books)
"…the way in which he hypnotizes his audience is always astounding."
— Navneet Nagra, sadmag
"What is most interesting about Un/inhabited is the ambiguity that complicates the more obvious metaphors linking text with land and reading with resource extraction.”
— Canadian Literature
Jordan Abel is a Nisg̱a’a writer from Vancouver. He is the author of The Place of Scraps (winner of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize), Un/inhabited, and Injun (winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize).
Kathleen Ritter (born 1974) is an artist, curator, and writer based in Vancouver and Paris who focuses on contemporary art.
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…stands as a companion to Abel’s previous book, Un/inhabited , which was composed using similar methods and …
…Jordan Abel, a natural follow-up to last year’s Un/inhabited, is a long poem composed of found text from …
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