John Kinsella

is a poet, novelist, critic, essayist and editor.

By this author


Culture February 25, 2023

The Book of Falling

Across the many modes of David McCooey’s fifth collection of poetry, The Book of Falling, there is one compelling voice that easily fuses irony and lament: the voice of “the poet”. I don’t necessarily mean McCooey himself, but rather …

Culture February 04, 2023

Iggy Pop’s Every Loser

Iggy Pop’s new album, Every Loser, is one of the great albums of its type – and its type is Iggy Pop.

Culture January 21, 2023

Sandbagging Yeats’ tower: finding the uncaged bird

“It’s not the ghost of the poet or his sad wife in the tower by the rushing water that we are looking for: sensation, awareness, presence. No, that’s circumstantial. It’s a bird, a rare bird we are hoping to spot to rewrite the truth …”

Culture October 15, 2022

Get Fucked

The Chats’ album Get Fucked emerges from a particularly Australian history of self-mocking political punk.

Culture July 23, 2022

Harvest Lingo

In his 14th collection, Harvest Lingo, Murri poet Lionel Fogarty continues his decades-long commitment to disrupting colonial language, colonial thought and their machineries of oppression. Fogarty creates poems in which language is liberated, …

Culture June 25, 2022

Two poems

“My great-grandmother interpreted as she played, or played from a score in the flickering light. How would she have run with this? Single mother, migrant, royalist, leftover Huguenot.  That lusty ethereal necromancer priest, the general stuffed into …”

Culture April 09, 2022

Judith Wright: Selected Writings

This is an essential gathering and representative selection from the vast body of Judith Wright’s nonfiction. It is well organised into thematic sections, with each essay, article and extract from longer work introduced precisely and briefly. Georgina …

Culture March 12, 2022

Continuous Creation

I have spent decades tussling with the poetry of Les Murray, just as I did in my friendly but contending and disputing personal interactions with him. This book of “last poems”, based on “three-quarter’s of a book’s worth” of poems respectfully …

Culture July 24, 2021

Two poems

“Between freeway and shopping precinct / Widowmakers throw limbs onto car roofs / And windscreens while a flock of a dozen / White-tailed black cockatoos counterpoint / The squalls coming from the north / Before setting off parallel to a thousand cars …”

Culture March 06, 2021

Psalms of sleep

“The house won’t stand without foundations of trust / and the town won’t work if people guard only their own. / The insomnia that racks your life is a strange greed of wakefulness / so difficult to shake in the lateness where body eats dark and light …”

Culture November 21, 2020

Brazen stats of empire

“I am a dressmaker who does alterations to make a living. You might call me a tailor, but what would you know? How long would you spend down here in the heat, working 12-hour shifts? And this is better than when I worked in the shop with 30 others doing …”