John Kinsella

Shifts in tone, setting and narration create a sense of the uncanny in Beam of Light, Kinsella's haunting collection of stories. A man is disturbed by the sight of a familiar dining table and chairs atop an impending bonfire of bulldozed trees, a girl finds a fox skeleton and feels compelled to protect its spirit by dispersing its bones over...

A unique experience. A novel in 'spindle' sonnets. A drama. An impassioned cry for a beautiful and stolen world under threat. A 'protester' who has been living in a shallow cave in the limestone cliff in front of Bathers Beach under the colonial Round House prison in Fremantle is arrested for demonstrating against the late 80's visit of the nuclear-armed...

Fascinated by caves and digging holes since childhood, Manfred discovers a path through to another realm via a Neolithic copper mine at Mount Gabriel in Schull, Ireland. The world of Hollow Earth, while no Utopia, is a sophisticated civilisation. Its genderless inhabitants are respectful of their environment, religious and cultural differences are accommodated without engendering hate or suspicion, and grain,...

Once a feted literary figure and the former lover of B-list movie star Lucida, Harold Lime is now a derelict, incontinent, asexual, ageing poet, who turns his back on material modernity. Withdrawing to a basement in the university town of Cambridge, England, he seeks isolation. However, human connections prove difficult to sever completely, as he is drawn out of himself...

Shortlisted for the NSW Premier's Literary Awards 2022: Christina Stead Prize for Fiction 'The tall trees nearby called them up and red-tailed black cockatoos carried messages to them that they told no one else about.' Pushing Back is John Kinsella's most haunting and timely fiction to date. It is populated with eccentric, compelling characters, drifters, unlikely friendships, the silences of...

John Kinsella's memoir of his rural life takes us deep into the heart of what it means to belong and unbelong. The joys and travails of childhood, adult addictions, missteps, and changing directions are acutely captured in poignant and poetic detail. While centred on Jam Tree Gully in rural Western Australia, the memoir also moves between Ohio, Schull, and Cambridge,...

From well-known poets Charmaine Papertalk Green and John Kinsella comes a tête-à-tête that is powerful, thought-provoking, challenging, and unapologetic. Papertalk Green and Kinsella call into question what we think we know about our country, colonisation, land, and identity. Each poem is part of a striking conversation that surrounds topics such as childhood, history, life, love, mining, death, respect, and cultural...

This most recent collection from John Kinsella takes its title from a poem of the same name. In the metaphor of the sack tumbling downstream with its cargo of drowned kittens lie layers of use, meaning and representation: love, cruelty, the pastoral, colonisation, landscape and identity. These poems are rich with intimate detail and Kinsella's often discomfiting insight.

The Fremantle Press Anthology of Western Australian Poetry is a comprehensive survey of the state's poets from the 19th century to today. Featuring work from 134 poets, and including the work of many WA Indigenous poets, this watershed anthology brings together the poems that have contributed to and defined the ways that Western Australians see themselves.

Wide in scope and bold in ambition, this exciting anthology covers the range of Australian poetic achievement, from early colonial verse through to contemporary work, with a strong recognition of Indigenous voices. This collection brings together great and familiar names with those that deserve better recognition. Including valuable introductory essays by John Kinsella, and biographical notes for all the poets,...

Shortlisted, ALS Gold Medal 2023 ART is the second collaborative poetry work from Charmaine Papertalk Green and John Kinsella. It is a formidable call and response piece that builds on the stunning dialogue the two authors began on paper in False Claims of Colonial Thieves (2018). While ART is a collaborative work, each poet's contributions are presented independently. They showcase...

From the internationally revered Australian poet John Kinsella comes this exceptional new collection that traces the ghosts of this country's violent and destructive history through the marks left on the land, in language and in ourselves. Ghost of Myself explores who we are when we write, how we embody what has come before us and what we will leave behind....

Inspired by the natural worlds surrounding Tübingen in Germany, Cambridge in England, the village of Schull in southwest Ireland, and the West Australian wheatbelt, Kinsella explores through his poems the protection and valuing of human and animal life, and the environment itself. Reflecting on how the local and international are in constant flux and exchange, these poems consider the plight...

In this forceful call to action, acclaimed poet John Kinsella explores deeply felt and ever more insistent ecological concerns in his signature lyrical and experimental activist poetry. Here Kinsella turns his restless, unblinking gaze to a world where art, music, and philosophy—the highest creations of the human imagination and empathy—suddenly find themselves in a time and place that not only...

Harsh Hakea is John Kinsella's second volume of collected works dating from 2005 to 2014, capturing a career in media res. It includes poems from widely read volumes like Jam Tree Gully, which won the 2013 Prime Minister's Literary Award for Poetry, and from lesser-known volumes like Love Sonnets, published by the British small press, Equipage. For the first time,...

Spirals is the third and final volume of John Kinsella's collected poems and dates from 2014-2023, seeing Kinsella through his fifties and without an end in sight. Spirals is not a case of a poet growing older, steadier, and more sedate but rather brings an ongoing sense of development that is also recursive and spatial. Politically, institutionally, and attitudinally, Kinsella...

This is the first volume of a three-volume Collected Poems by John Kinsella that dates back to when he was seventeen and continues through forty-one-plus years of writing and memorising poetry. Collected in one place for the first time are poems that have appeared in chapbooks or other publications outside Australia, or that are out of print. Kinsella's major poetic...

Winner of the Prime Minister's Literary Award for Poetry and the Christopher Brennan Award (for lifetime achievement in poetry), and shortlisted for the Steele Rudd Prize for a collection of short fiction, John Kinsella returns with a not-to-be-missed addition to the canon of one of Australia's most original and incisive writers. A man who never sleeps takes a cross-continent train...