news | Tuesday April 7, 2020

The 2nd edition of Jordan Abel's Un/inhabited has arrived!

The second edition of award-winning Nisga’a poet Jordan Abel’s second collection of poetry, Un/inhabited, has arrived from the printer!

Un/inhabited 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 Ctrl+F, he searched the document 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.

The second edition of the book features a new cover, page 183, a 2019 artwork by Alanna Irene Edwards, who is an artist, curator, and writer of Mi’gmaq and settler descent.

Pick up your copy of Un/inhabited today!

cover of 2nd edition of Un/inhabited