Injun on Griffin shortlist
April 13th, 2017
Injun, by Jordan Abel (Talonbooks $16.95), has been shortlisted for the Canadian shortlist of the 2017 Griffin Poetry Prize. He will be awarded $10,000 for participation in shortlist readings. The winning entry will be announced in June. Injun, his follow-up to his second poetry project, Un/inhabited, is comprised of ‘found text’ from western novels of the pulp fiction genre published between 1840 and 1950. By gathering all sentences with the word “injun” embedded, retrieved using the ‘Find’ function, Abel seeks to destabilize the colonial concept of the “Indian” as it was allowed to grow in the ‘western’ world of the so-called western world. The Nisga’a author holds a BA from the University of Alberta and an MFA from the University of British Columbia. He has been an editor for Poetry is Dead magazine and PRISM international. While completing his Ph.D at Simon Fraser University, his studies have foccussed on “digital humanities” and indigenous poetics. Jordan Abel received the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize in 2014 for his first book, The Place of Scraps, in which he revisits and re-examines the role of ethnographer Marius Barbeau. 978-0-88922-977-8
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