Amaranth Borsuk and Sarah Dowling Publish Interview and Review of Poet Jordan Abel

The current issue of ASAP/J, the web journal of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present, includes Borsuk and Dowling's collaborative review of Injun, Jordan Abel's Griffin-Award winning poetry collection collaged, cut-up, and erased from a corpus of 91 public-domain pulp western novels. Their review is accompanied by an interview with Abel in which the three discuss Injun in the context of his body of work, both previous and forthcoming, which uses appropriated source texts and conceptual approaches to subvert the settler colonial narratives these texts encode. As Abel explains, "that kind of relationship between the conceptual practice and the mechanisms of colonialism is something I’m really interested in and that also comes up in my other work—the relationship in The Place of Scraps and Marius Barbeau’s attempted erasure of Indigenous peoples and my erasure of his work, lined with the vanishing Indian archetype. I think those are the reasons why I’m interested in conceptual practices in the first place: finding methods of writing that respond structurally to issues or mechanisms of colonialism that I’m interested in thinking about somehow." Read on at ASAP/J!