Jordan Abel

As a poetry book, I think this is a little above my comfort level. But, as a word-based art piece and project, it's freaking brilliant.

Before reading the poems, skip to the back of the book and read about Abel's process. He searched for the word "injun" in public domain western novels and used what he found to make this collection. The poems focus on racism and the representation of Indigenous peoples.

If you take his focus and process in context, the poems become something so much more than words and I realized that it wasn't just about reading each poem individually, but about seeing them together as one big, broken up message.… (mehr)

Dedicated to the Indigenous peoples of North America, the place of scraps juxtaposes poetry and visual art with excerpts from Marius Barbeau’s "classic" anthropological study Totem Poles.

Text and black and white photographs collide.

A full set of paragraphs on one page is presented on the following page with only select words evident, suggesting a new meaning.

The ‘his’ of history appears like a settler’s declarative statement upon arrival in a homeland.

Sometimes only the punctuation remains, and readers must wonder at the decision, for instance, to include the indigenous language only in parentheses in Barbeau's work.

Curators and collectors claimed articles as small as beads and as large as totem poles, often in the name of preservation not extermination, and Jordan Abel invites readers to reconsider elements of this his-torical process and its legacy for today’s descendants.… (mehr)