Un/inhabited

Author: Jordan Abel

Designer: Tania Willard

Publisher: Talonbooks (2020)

Award-winning Nisg̱a’a poet Jordan Abel’s second collection of poetry, Un/inhabited, maps the terrain of the public domain to create a layered investigation of the interconnections between language and land. This updated edition has been revised to follow contemporary stylistic guidelines for Indigenous orthography and usage; it also includes a beautiful new cover featuring the work of Alanna Irene Edwards, an artist, curator, and writer of Mi’gmaq and settler descent, as well as updated concrete poems, and essays by Project Space founder Tracy Stefanucci and independent curator Kathleen Ritter—the first pieces of scholarship on Abel’s work. Abel constructed the book’s source text by compiling in their entirety ninety-one western novels found on the website Project Gutenberg, an online archive of works whose copyright has expired. Using his word processor’s Ctrl+F function, he searched the compilation 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?) accumulating toward a representation of the public domain as a discoverable and inhabitable body of land.