"This is a formally daring, emotionally resonant work that threads together what the powerful prefer to keep apart. Kinsella confronts the entangled violences of empire, colonialism, and global capitalism. Fierce, expansive, and deeply questioning, these poems resist isolation and speak truth to power in a fractured, burning world.
For John Kinsella -- vegan, anarchist, activist pacifist, and poet -- the title of his poem ‘anti-islanding’ points to what this collection achieves -- the threading together in an imaginative whole what are too often discrete ‘issues’: personal experiences as an Australian descendant of settlers on indigenous Noongar land, responses to world traumas such as the genocidal war on Gaza, racist and xenophobic hostility to refugees and economic migrants, patriarchal power at social, familial and literary levels, homophobia, the trade in futures as an ‘investment in distress’, the profiteering of arms manufacturers, use of toxic pesticides and industrialised farming, carbon capitalism and global warming, monarchical pretensions, destructive social inequalities, exploitative relations between humans and animals, species extinctions, and much more. What ties these areas of focus together is Kinsella’s knowledge of the workings of empire, colonialism and contemporary global capitalism. But this is never other than a collection of poems, and Kinsella is deeply conscious that poets have been, and are, as capable of becoming voices for the powerful as anyone else (and for the powerful to use art as a disguise), and the collection is enriched by his questioning dialogues with poets from Virgil to Thomas Hardy."
Paperback.
