[excerpt: poetry]
Jordan Abel: “[Untitled]”
Back in November 2024—a lifetime ago, if you follow the global news cycle—Vancouver-born queer Nisga’a writer Jordan Abel, whose poetry volume Injun won the Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize in 2017, was interviewed about Empty Spaces.
A jury of peers had recently selected Abel’s self-described “extremely difficult” novel (“a 70,000-word novel and there are no human characters and there’s no dialogue,” he explained) for the Governor General’s Award.
At the time, Abel told the CBC’s Daybreak North host Caroline de Ryk that he was in the midst of a new project.
“I’m working on a book of poetry,” he said. “It’s called Dad Era. It’s about my daughter and it’s about Indigenous knowledge transmission and Indigenous parenting. I think it’s a very funny book, and I think it’s very lighthearted and joyful, and that’s something that I think has been missing from some of my writing. My last five books, there’s very few laughs, there’s very few, like, moments of levity.”
As planned, the book would also feature a juxtaposition of Abel’s words and his father’s visual art.
About eighteen months have passed and Dad Era is scheduled for release on May 12.
As for the lighthearted levity, the book is scarcely a compendium of corny dad jokes or befuddled admissions about a newly-acquired dadbod.
After all, the volume and the humour therein is necessarily filtered through Abel’s poetic practice.
He’s explained that sensibility in these terms:
Poetry is at its best when it provides a space for radical work to exist. I’m not so much interested in the poem as I am interested in the expansive possibilities of what poetry
can or cannot contain. I’m not so much interested in the poetic as I am interested in providing space for work that does not fit easily anywhere else. I am interested in the
work that occupies the interstitial spaces between genres, between forms—writing that is explosive, resistant, and uneasily categorized. My work has always resisted categorization and likewise has moved fluidly between and across genres. My work is also deeply invested in understanding and thinking through urban Indigeneity, intergenerational trauma, and Indigenous dispossession.
In Dad Era, dad-themed poetry might mean earnest sentiment expressed to his child (“As a person, I have not been the same since you came into my life”).
Then again, it might confiding, in an off-the-cuff way: “I am no expert in racial passing but I do know that declining invitations to the Calgary Stampede is one the strangest things I’ve ever had to do.”
Plus, evident below, a curious, intriguing marriage of poetic text and layered imagery.
The British Columbia Review would like to thank Jordan Abel and publisher Coach House Books for permission to reprint the following excerpts. —BJG
* * *
*
The British Columbia Review
Interim Editors: Trevor Marc Hughes (nonfiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie
Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an online book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.
“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster