- 115: SPACE
with A Sometimes
114: NO THEME 13
with J Toledo & C Tse
113: INVISIBLE WALLS
with A Walker & D Disney
112: TREAT
with T Dearborn
111: BABY
with S Deo & L Ferney
110: POP!
with Z Frost & B Jessen
109: NO THEME 12
with C Maling & N Rhook
108: DEDICATION
with L Patterson & L Garcia-Dolnik
107: LIMINAL
with B Li
106: OPEN
with C Lowe & J Langdon
105: NO THEME 11
with E Grills & E Stewart
104: KIN
with E Shiosaki
103: AMBLE
with E Gomez and S Gory
102: GAME
with R Green and J Maxwell
101: NO THEME 10
with J Kinsella and J Leanne
100: BROWNFACE
with W S Dunn
99: SINGAPORE
with J Ip and A Pang
97 & 98: PROPAGANDA
with M Breeze and S Groth
96: NO THEME IX
with M Gill and J Thayil
95: EARTH
with M Takolander
94: BAYT
with Z Hashem Beck
93: PEACH
with L Van, G Mouratidis, L Toong
92: NO THEME VIII
with C Gaskin
91: MONSTER
with N Curnow
90: AFRICAN DIASPORA
with S Umar
89: DOMESTIC
with N Harkin
88: TRANSQUEER
with S Barnes and Q Eades
87: DIFFICULT
with O Schwartz & H Isemonger
86: NO THEME VII
with L Gorton
85: PHILIPPINES
with Mookie L and S Lua
84: SUBURBIA
with L Brown and N O'Reilly
83: MATHEMATICS
with F Hile
82: LAND
with J Stuart and J Gibian
81: NEW CARIBBEAN
with V Lucien
80: NO THEME VI
with J Beveridge
57.1: EKPHRASTIC
with C Atherton and P Hetherington
57: CONFESSION
with K Glastonbury
56: EXPLODE
with D Disney
55.1: DALIT / INDIGENOUS
with M Chakraborty and K MacCarter
55: FUTURE MACHINES
with Bella Li
54: NO THEME V
with F Wright and O Sakr
53.0: THE END
with P Brown
52.0: TOIL
with C Jenkins
51.1: UMAMI
with L Davies and Lifted Brow
51.0: TRANSTASMAN
with B Cassidy
50.0: NO THEME IV
with J Tranter
49.1: A BRITISH / IRISH
with M Hall and S Seita
49.0: OBSOLETE
with T Ryan
48.1: CANADA
with K MacCarter and S Rhodes
48.0: CONSTRAINT
with C Wakeling
47.0: COLLABORATION
with L Armand and H Lambert
46.1: MELBOURNE
with M Farrell
46.0: NO THEME III
with F Plunkett
45.0: SILENCE
with J Owen
44.0: GONDWANALAND
with D Motion
43.1: PUMPKIN
with K MacCarter
43.0: MASQUE
with A Vickery
42.0: NO THEME II
with G Ryan
41.1: RATBAGGERY
with D Hose
41.0: TRANSPACIFIC
with J Rowe and M Nardone
40.1: INDONESIA
with K MacCarter
40.0: INTERLOCUTOR
with L Hart
39.1: GIBBERBIRD
with S Gory
39.0: JACKPOT!
with S Wagan Watson
38.0: SYDNEY
with A Lorange
37.1: NEBRASKA
with S Whalen
37.0: NO THEME!
with A Wearne
36.0: ELECTRONICA
with J Jones
John Kinsella
Dante Graphology Drawing Poems: 14 Works by John Kinsella
As part of my decades-long Graphology poems cycle, I have created many drawing-poems that (to my mind at least) exist between/around/across written text and visual images, and which hopefully test and blur semantic delineations and category definitions.
Posted in ARTWORKS
Tagged John Kinsella
The Stakes of Settlement: Fences in Ned Kelly and Michael Farrell
Signalling possession, privatisation, and productivity, the fence was one of the main props by which a cadastral grid (comprised of adjoining rectangular land parcels) was imposed on the Australian landscape.
Posted in ESSAYS
Tagged Denis Byrne, James Jiang, John Clare, John Kinsella, michael farrell, Ned Kelly
NO THEME 10 Editorial
A callout for a poetry of consciousness ‘that enacts and is responsible for what it considers’, that has been written with an awareness of ‘crises, brinks and redress’, was always going to bring some powerful and confronting work.
Posted in ESSAYS
Tagged Jeanine Leane, John Kinsella
Submission to Cordite 101: NO THEME 10
Images courtesy of Jeanine Leane and John Kinsella. From now, and throughout 2021, we’re celebrating 25 years of publishing. Milestones include the publication of Cordite Poetry Review’s 100th issue in February, Cordite Books’ 40th print title, and the new free …
Posted in GUNCOTTON
Tagged Jeanine Leane, John Kinsella, Kent MacCarter
Brimstone Villanelle
All the sulphur of experiments and gardens of explosions and purifications, the Golden Splash Tooth the subceracea light of the shades and the damp and the sun’s show-through the mimicry of light and shadow-skin. Sun’s action is beneath away from …
Posted in 95: EARTH
Tagged John Kinsella
To Outlive a Home: Poetics of a Crumbling Domestic
While these pre-federation tropes of settler colonial Australia’s multifaceted and at times contradictory pastoral modes seem to recognise something of their incompatibility with Aboriginal land, they seek their resolution from burial, rather than reciprocal encounter with Aboriginal presence.
Posted in ESSAYS
Tagged Emily Stewart, Evelyn Araluen, Friedrich Hölderlin, John Kinsella, Jonathan Dunk, Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner, les murray, Melody Paloma
Review Short: Charmaine Papertalk-Green’s and John Kinsella’s False Claims of Colonial Thieves
False Claims of Colonial Thieves weaves together two disparate voices, Charmaine Papertalk-Green and John Kinsella, in a demanding collection that reaffirms the troubling environmental era we are living through. Structurally, the book shifts between traditionally oppositional views – an Aboriginal woman and a white man.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Charmaine Papertalk-Green, John Kinsella, Timmah Ball
We Ask More
‘Give we the hills our equal prayer, Earth’s breezy hills and heaven’s blue sea; I ask for nothing further here But my own heart and liberty.’ Emily Brontë Ask everything more of layout under pressure. Ask for depths outside and …
Posted in 86: NO THEME VII
Tagged John Kinsella
A Poetics of a Politics
When delivering a thesis presentation based on rethinking the methodologies for reading Aboriginal Australian poetics, a fellow postgraduate student asked me, ‘Do you consider your thesis political?’
Posted in ESSAYS
Tagged Ali Alizadeh, Dashiell Moore, Édouard Glissant, Gilles Deleuze, Gloria Anzaldua, John Kinsella, Ledelle Moe, Lionel Fogarty, Stuart Cooke
Introduction to Matthew Hall’s False Fruits
Fruit is the apogee of the pastoral. It’s what the work, the waiting, the ritual and the thanks are for. But the making of fruit is costly and even the ‘natural’ cycle of things will be managed so some factors are privileged over others. In this cycle of post-lyrical poems, Hall questions the form and circumstances of these factors. What are they?
Posted in INTRODUCTIONS
Tagged Alissa Dinallo, John Kinsella, Lily Mae Martin, Matthew Hall
Activist Journal: Ireland and Germany Extraction, 2015-16
18/9/2015 Rosewood, Schull, Co. Cork, Ireland. Difficult and full fortnight of work coming up before I have to travel solo to London on bus, ferry and train.
Posted in ESSAYS
Tagged John Kinsella, michael dransfield, Tom Raworth, Tracy Ryan
Unbidden: Settler Poetry in the Presence of Indigenous Sovereignty
Influenced and shaped by some fifty years of Indigenous poetry in English, the last couple of decades of Australian settler poetry have advanced prolific attempts to ‘write (oneself) into the country’ (Van Teeseling 209): producing varied and sometimes radical poetries of regionality, topography, climate, and the histories, narratives and landmarks running through and over them.
Posted in ESSAYS
Tagged Bonny Cassidy, Jen Crawford, John Kinsella, John Mateer, Kim Scott, michael farrell, Nicholas Birns, Stuart Cooke
Chris Brown Reviews John Kinsella
The poetry of John Kinsella will need little introduction in a forum such as this, though with the recent publication of his Drowning in Wheat: Selected Poems, aspects of Kinsella’s biography move more meaningfully into focus. Author of over forty books, Kinsella’s writing career spans three decades. What with the wealth of material available to him, Kinsella and his editors might have been spoilt for choice; though how to bring this wealth into a general coherence?
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Chris Brown, John Kinsella
Bonny Cassidy Reviews Contemporary Australian Literature: A World Not Yet Dead
As Feature Reviews Editor and sometime reviewer for Cordite Poetry Review it is an unusual (and therefore fun) privilege to consider a title in which poetry is critically addressed in the company of other forms. Too often it is it either quarantined within poetry-only criticism, or mentioned as an embarrassing aside to discussions of prose.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Bonny Cassidy, John Kinsella, John Mateer, Nicholas Birns, Ouyang Yu, Pam Brown
Natural Selection: Ecological Postcolonialism as Bearing on Place
Australian poetry reminds us that we cannot encounter the natural world except by cultural means.
Posted in ESSAYS
Tagged Andrew Lansdown, Caroline Caddy, Charles Birch, David Brooks, David Martin, Eric Beach, Gary Catalano, Jennifer Martiniello, John Kinsella, John Manifold, judith wright, Kevin Roberts, Laurie Duggan, Lionel Fogarty, Oodgeroo Noonuccal, Phillip Hall, Romaine Moreton, Rosemary Dobson, Samuel Wagan Watson, Shirley Walker
The Collapse of Space: On Lisa Gorton’s The Life of Houses
I think making comparisons between Lisa Gorton’s The Life of Houses and other writers is somewhat distracting of the novel’s achievement.
Posted in ESSAYS
Tagged John Kinsella, Lisa Gorton
Simon Eales Reviews John Kinsella
In the first rabbit poems by the late J S Harry, her rabbit-character, Peter Henry Lepus, is thrown into a number of desolate or alien environments. Peter is ‘dumped … on the Desert of Sense’, ‘comes to … FORTY-THREE BLENDS / OF DUSTED-OFF & SUNDRIED RATIONALISM’, and ‘gets lost in “Calcutta” / on his way to visit Farmer McGruber’s vegetable patch.’ He is displaced most comprehensively in the middle of Iraq, 2003, a warzone that amplifies his naïve and interlopic perspective. Such meaning-deprived contexts let Harry explore belonging, identity, and the stability of concepts themselves. In the poem, ‘Small & Rural’, for example:
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged John Kinsella, Simon Eales
from Lip Trills
Strung out goes hard wired into the signature scarring so shown on arching barks as sampled tolerance slurs and ligatures, he shall have music wherever he goes to stack accumulating pocket money with foxed gatefold and the bells on his …
Posted in 67: A BRITISH / IRISH
Tagged Drew Milne, John Kinsella
Australian Ecopoetics Past, Present, Future: What Do the Plants Say?
Like the country’s arid interior, contemporary Australian ecopoetics is vast and robust. The expressions of Australian ecopoetry are as varied as the antipodean landscape itself, underscoring the intricate connections between language and ecology in this part of the world. The Mediterranean climate of Western Australia’s southwest corner, the Red Centre of Uluru, the tropical rainforests of Queensland, the temperate Tasmanian old-growth forests and the alpine reaches of the Victorian High Country signify this: rather than a contiguous desert or a terra nullius (as some readers both inside and outside of Australia may still believe), the Australian environment is a mosaic of biota, climates, topographies and regions.
Paul Hetherington Reviews The turnrow Anthology of Contemporary Australian Poetry
John Kinsella is an Australian poet with a high profile and a long record of achievement, including winning the 2013 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry. He is also an assiduous anthologiser. Most notably, he edited The Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry (2008), one of the more successful of recent attempts to establish an indicative canon of Australian poetry (although this was not, perhaps, Kinsella’s avowed intention with that book).
Justin Clemens Reviews Poetry and the Trace
Sometimes irritating, often informative, occasionally incisive and sporadically genuinely interrogatory, the thoughtfulness evinced by (many of) the writings collected in Poetry and the Trace triggers further chains of association and dissociation. This is a genuinely critical collection in various senses of that word: at once analytic, hortatory, and urgent.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged ann vickery, Bonny Cassidy, David McCooey, Elizabeth Wilson, Emily Bitto, Emily Finlay, Jessica L. Wilkinson, John Hawke, John Kinsella, john tranter, Justin Clemens, Kate Fagan, Kate Lilley, Keri Glastonbury, Kim Cheng Boey, Lionel Fogarty, Melissa Boyd, Melissa Hardie, Nina Philadelphoff-Puren, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Simon West, Susan Stewart, Thomas Ford
Scarabs
Ah let’s do new where scarabs click Resonant dust from hashish headlight Forever dream thing sweeps through high brocade And mind is central, serene, lavender mists With a sucker punch below the graft, Below a mortar and pestle imprimatur — …
Posted in 63: COLLABORATION
Tagged John Kinsella, Thurston Moore
Riposte
Coming back to their neck of the woods, a shout was as good as a wolf and a basket as full as a boot full of tarnished medallions and useless keys, pugnacious as costume on a moonlit patio, swilling prosecco …
Posted in 63: COLLABORATION
Tagged John Kinsella, Pam Brown
Buzzkill
In the constant tramline motion of his trainers He took the third and added a choice amendment To their wish fulfilment; but don’t doubt he loved — He did, big time and strong, the tall buildings wavering. Sneaker rocker ripping …
Posted in 63: COLLABORATION
Tagged John Kinsella, Thurston Moore
