National Network for Equitable Library Service

Jordan Abel's extraordinary new book and debut work of fiction, Empty Spaces, grows out of his groundbreaking visual expression in NISHGA. That book integrated descriptions of the landscape from James Fenimore Cooper's settler classic The Last of the Mohicans into visual compositions. In Empty Spaces, Abel reinscribes those words on the page itself and in doing so subjects them to bold re-writings. Reimagining the nineteenth-century text from the contemporary perspective of an urban Nisga'a person whose relationship to land and traditional knowledge was severed by colonial progress, Abel explores what it means to be Indigenous without access to familial territory and complicates popular ideals about Indigenous storytelling. Engaging the land through fiction and imagination, the successive chapters of Empty Spaces move toward an eerie, looping, and atmospheric rendering of place that evolves despite the violent and reckless histories of North America. The result is a bold and profound new vision of history that decenters human perception and forgoes Westernized ways of seeing--rather than turning to characters, plot, and conflict to explore truth, Empty Spaces invites us to instead understand that the land knows everything that can and will happen, even as the world lurches toward uncertainty.