More about the book
Award-winning Nisga’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. 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. Featuring a text by independent curator Kathleen Ritter – the first piece 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 in the empty space when we see nothing.
Book purchase
Un/inhabited, Jordan Abel
- Language
- Released
- 2014
- product-detail.submit-box.info.binding
- (Paperback),
- Book condition
- Good
- Price
- €4.79
Payment methods
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- Title
- Un/inhabited
- Language
- English
- Authors
- Jordan Abel
- Publisher
- Talonbooks
- Released
- 2014
- Format
- Paperback
- Pages
- 240
- ISBN10
- 0889229228
- ISBN13
- 9780889229228
- Series
- Tags
- Fiction, Poetry, Indigenous Tribes
- Rating
- 4.25 out of 5
- Description
- Award-winning Nisga’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. 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. Featuring a text by independent curator Kathleen Ritter – the first piece 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 in the empty space when we see nothing.




