Jordan Abel is a Nisga’a writer currently completing his PhD at Simon Fraser University, where he focuses on digital humanities and indigenous poetics. Abel’s conceptual writing engages with the representation of indigenous peoples in anthropology and popular culture. His chapbooks have been published by JackPine Press, and above/ground press, and his work has appeared in numerous magazines and journals across Canada. He is an editor for Poetry is Dead magazine and a former editor for PRISM international and Geist. Abel’s first book, The Place of Scraps was a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and won the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Abel’s second book, Un/inhabited was published in 2014. CBC Books named Abel one of 12 Young Writers to Watch (2015).
Judges’ Citation
Jordan Abel’s collection Injun evacuates the subtexts of possession, territory, and erasure.
Jordan Abel’s collection Injun evacuates the subtexts of possession, territory, and erasure. Lyric, yes: ‘that part of sparkling / kn ife love that // hates the trouble of rope / and the letters / of tow ns.’ Testimony of another kind, too: ‘all misdeeds at the milk house / all heap shoots by the sagebrush // all the grub is somewhere / down in the hungry bellies […]’. The fog of tedious over-dramatization clears and the open skies of discourse can be discerned. What does it mean to arrange hate to look like verse? What becomes of the ugly and meaningless? Words are restored to their constituent elements as countermovements in Abel’s hands, just as they are divested of their capacity for productive violence. The golden unity of language and its silvered overcoding erode, bringing to bear the ‘heard snatches of comment / going up from the river bank.’ To pixelize is to mobilize, not to disappear.
Selected poems
by Jordan Abel
Copyright © 2016 Jordan Abel
1)
Copyright © 2016 by Jordan Abel, Injun, Talonbooks
3)
he played injun in gods country
where boys proved themselves clean
dumb beasts who could cut fire
out of the whitest1 sand
he played english across the trail
where girls turned plum wild
garlic and strained words
through the window of night
he spoke through numb lips and
breathed frontier2
Copyright © 2016 Jordan Abel
a)
he heard snatches of comment
going up from the river bank
all them injuns is people first
and besides for this buckskin
why we even shoot at them
and seems like a sign of warm
dead as a horse friendship
and time to pedal their eyes
to lean out and say the truth3
all you injuns is just white keys
From Injun by Jordan Abel
Copyright © 2016 Jordan Abel
b)
some fearful heap
some crooked swell
bent towards him
and produced a pair
of nickel-plated pullers
a bull winder of
dirty tenderness 4
that stiffened into
that low-brow ice
that dead injun game
Copyright © 2016 Jordan Abel
c)
if prayers were tolerable
if money13 shook like rattlers
trouble now up in the air
concerns over missing knives
after all if a fella dont shoot
no one man can change him
because a man can be anybody
except little
even snakes are more vital
even bandages wash away
Copyright © 2016 Jordan Abel