Un/inhabited
CBC Books | Posted: March 7, 2017 6:26 PM | Last Updated: June 29, 2018
Jordan Abel
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. (From Talon Books)