Jordan Abel, Dad Era

 

A dad is garbage is gone.

First my father disappeared and then my mother
            abandoned all rational thought.

Did you know that my father taught me
            nothing at all?

To be creative. To be loving. To be generous and kind
            and human were all lessons that I learned
            alone in the snow.

The latest from Edmonton-based poet, editor and prose writer Jordan Abel, a book I hadn’t known was coming, is the book-length lyric suite Dad Era (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2026). Following an array of award-winning titles such as the novel Empty Spaces (Toronto ON: McClelland and Stewart, 2023) [see my essay on such here], the memoir, NISHGA (McClelland and Stewart, 2021) [see my review of such here] and his third poetry title, the Griffin Poetry Prize-winning Injun (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2016) [see my review of such here], Dad Era sits, as one might suggest, a self-contained follow-up to the content of NISHGA, stitched together as a book-length suite of first person declarations directed at, and prompted by the birth of, his young daughter, Phoenix. “I have been alive long enough to know that I / don’t know anything.” he writes, early on in the collection. “You are a person and I love you.” A bit further down, as he offers: “I can’t wait for you to beat me at Mario Kart.”

This is, as the title suggests, the beginning of a new and fresh era in the author’s life. Set as a book-length meditation on and around fatherhood, fathers and being present, Abel composes a lyric around the experience (and joys and anxieties and terrors and intimacies) of and around new fatherhood, following a trajectory of similar explorations by other contemporary poet-fathers, including Calgary poet Richard Harrison’s Big Breath of a Wish (Toronto ON: Wolsak and Wynn, 1998), Dallas, Texas poet Farid Matuk’s This Isa Nice Neighborhood (Chicago IL/Denver CO: Letter Machine Editions, 2010) and My Daughter La Chola (Boise ID: Ahsahta Press, 2013), California poet Dan Thomas-Glass’ Kate & Sonia (Houston TX: little red leaves, textile series, 2011) [see my review of such here] and Toronto poet Dale Martin Smith’s Flying Red Horse (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2021) [see my review of such here]. As well, once any of us become a parent, one immediately begins to assess (or reassess) one’s own parents, seeing those relationships, for good or for ill, with fresh eyes. For Abel, the ongoing loss, through absence, of a father is clearly profound, and underlines across the length and breadth of this collection. As he articulated through NISHGA, his father’s life, as well as the lives of his father’s parents, were impacted directly and profoundly through the Residential School system, introducing a rippling effect of generational trauma that Abel clearly (and obviously) wishes to keep from negatively impacting his own parenting, and his daughter, Phoenix. “I am no expert in racial passing but I do know that / declining invitations to the Calgary / Stampede is one of the most necessary / things I’ve ever had to do.” he writes. “Did you know that all we had to do to arrive here / on the couch in front of our giant flatscreen / was just to survive an attempted genocide?”

Dad Era is charming, and at time, devastating; stitched together with little wisdoms, observations, declarations, admissions, questions and negotiation, offering a poetics of loss, placement, inquiry and illustration. He offers some lovely lyric curls and trails, even across dark passages and paths, attempting to see through that dark into something else, something beyond and truly possible; something directly prompted by this pure gift of parenting, and the opportunity to consciously and purposefully do and be better. “Do you know that family is sometimes just the / people you’re around? Just the people / you choose?” he writes. “I don’t know everything about being sober, but I do / know that if I kept drinking and kept doing / drugs I’d probably be dead by now.” A few pages later:

Did you know that we are both indebted to the
            contours of the North Saskatchewan River? 

May your happiness swell outward from every time
            I said yes to ice cream for breakfast. 

Did you know that being a parent feels a lot like
            being kicked repeatedly in the face while
            doing a puzzle that’s trying to run away
            from you? 

A father is absent is missing.

I used to think that living and dying in Burnaby was
            a real possibility. 

The greatest moment I had with my dad was not a
           real thing.

Composed as an endearing, open-hearted lyric, Dad Era articulates threads of grief, anxiety and loss, wishing to be better than his own father, and better than he himself had been. As the lyric presents, Abel is already aware, being both present and attentive, that he is different, and that he is and can be present, and joyous, and celebratory. This book, in itself, is a gift, both to his daughter and to himself, allowing an open-hearted possibility around, among other things, an eventual forgiveness. As he writes on the final page of the collection:

If I can pass on some wisdom that I learned the hard way
            it is that you are loved and you belong here. 

I do something wonder what would happen if we just let
            you live at Zoo Camp for the rest of your life. 

Did you know that Indigenous joy ‘is an ethics
            of resistance’?