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Poetry in Motion: Injun
A recent winner of the notable Canadian 2017 Griffin Poetry Prize, Jordan Abel’s Injun (Talonbooks) explores the representation of Indigenous peoples during the heyday of pulp publishing, specifically between 1840 and 1950, in a long-form poem. Read on for more about the book, and the artist which Canadian Literature calls “one of the most innovative and thrilling poets writing today.”
he played injun in gods country
where boys proved themselves clean
dumb beasts who could cut fire
out of the whitest1 sand
he played english across the trail
where girls turned plum wild
garlic and strained words
through the window of night
he spoke through numb lips
and breathed frontier2
b)he heard snatches of comment
going up from the river bank
all them injuns is people first
and besides for this buckskin
why we even shoot at them
and seems like a sign of warm
dead as a horse friendship
and time to pedal their eyes
to lean out and say the
truth3 all you injuns is just white keys
c)some fearful heap
some crooked swell
bent towards him
and produced a pair
of nickel-plated pullers
a bull winder of
dirty tenderness4
that stiffened into
that low-brow ice
that dead injun game
Jordan introducing and reading from Injun (reading begins at 3:56).* * *Jordan Abel is currently completing his PhD at Simon Fraser University, where his studies focus on digital humanities and indigenous poetics. Abel’s first book, The Place of Scraps (Talonbooks), was a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and won the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. After the publication of his second book, Un/inhabited, he was named one of 12 Young Writers to Watch by CBC Books (July 2015). This year Injun was the Canadian winner of the 2017 Griffin Poetry Prize.* * *Big thanks to Spencer Williams at Talonbooks for sharingInjun work with us. For more poetry videos and excerpts, click here.Tagged: