Abel’s PhD focuses on digital humanities and indigenous poetics and studies how decolonization operates in the works of contemporary Indigenous and non-Indigenous poets. This is reflected in Injun, where Abel uses digital tools to mine language from pulp westerns. By using text from these novels to compose his poetry, Abel unsettles the relationship between language, representation, and histories of colonialism to create a visually striking response to the western genre.

Injun is Abel’s third book of poetry. In 2014 his book, The Place of Scraps, won the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize for B.C.’s best book of poetry, and was a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award.