John Kinsella Knihy

The story delves into the life of Moondyne Joe, a notorious escape artist in colonial Australia whose repeated prison breakouts sparked chaos for the governor. His legacy includes being a lawbreaker, the spouse of a brothel madam, and a folk hero who connected with Indigenous communities. Despite his eventual demise in a lunatic asylum, he became a symbol of resistance against the harsh convict system. The book offers a playful yet insightful exploration of his life and the societal challenges he faced.

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 128 poets, and accompanied by biographical notes and an introductory essay by editors John Kinsella and Tracy Ryan, this watershed anthology brings together the poems that have contributed to and defined the way that Western Australians see themselves.

The first book ever to look in-depth at reggae as an artistic form, Natural Mysticism shows how reggae combines politics, sex, spirituality and art, and offers in depth analyzes of leading reggae artists such as Burning Spear, Lee Scratch Perry and Bob Marley.

Frank and earnest, this moving collection of poetry offers a glimpse into the support centers and hospice outside of Montego Bay and the many lives that have been lost to HIV/AIDS in Jamaica. Culled from open dialogue with sufferers and those who care for them, and coupled with evocative photographs, AIDS becomes a channel for universal dramas, archetypal voices, stoicism, despair, and deeply human deceptions. Full of memories of a time when diagnosis was equivalent to a death sentence, each piece brings the lives of the indiscriminant victims to the forefront and battles the notion that this can only happen to others.

Exploring the interplay between writing and visual art, this collection features John Kinsella's innovative 'drawing-poems' that merge journal entries with poetic expression. The work reflects on orthography, handwriting, and perception while presenting a dialogue between the natural environment and social justice issues. Influenced by kaleidoscopes and William Blake, the poems and drawings intertwine, challenging traditional representation and dimensionality. This unique blend serves as both artistic intervention and commentary, inviting readers into a vibrant, interconnected experience.

When Speak from Here to There was published in 2016 it was, remarkably, doing something quite new. There are of course the conversations implied in the poems of Coleridge and Wordsworth, but no two poets had committed to, in the words of Will Harris, the almost daily “structure of call-and-response, each utterance is filtered through the other.”This richly multi-layered dialogue arises from responses to each poet’s public world, to the private worlds of family, to the inner world of wondering how one can write “love poems in a time of war, these times of monstrous beasts,” and from the stimulus of the other’s poem arriving in the e-mail in-tray. Though both poets express their anxieties about the limitations of the prophetic, there is the countervailing witness of their immensely fertile imaginative response to each other’s words and the comfort that “On the road, you long for the like-minded” is a longing that is being fulfilled.

The third in a quartet of poem-dialogues between Kwame Dawes and John Kinsella, begun in 2015 with the critically acclaimed 'Speak From Here to There' (2016), and followed by 'A New Beginning' (2018), Tangling With The Epic explores commonalities and difference, the results reminding us of how poetry can offer comfort and solace, and how it can ignite a peculiar creative frenzy that enriches.

After completing four collections of dialogue in poems, Kwame Dawes in Nebraska (via Ghana and Jamaica) and John Kinsella in Western Australia, have produced a monumental fifth volume in four unHistory. unHistory is an essential record of our times by two world-leading poets, acutely sensitive to the bracing global turmoil of the last five years. It is an exploration of history’s undertones, its personal, familial, and institutional resonances and of the relationship between public events and the literary imagination. It is at the same time an elegant enactment of friendship and memory. As in previous volumes, the marvel is poetry that has all the fluidity of spontaneous response, and the shapeliness and finesse of the most deeply considered work written by two prolific and influential writers at the height of their powers as poets.

Short stories from Goldie Goldbloom, award-winning author of The Paperbark Shoe. Dark. Delicious. Superb.

Exploring the intricate connections between place, individual, and the natural environment, this work serves as a sequel to John Kinsella's earlier critical text, Disclosed Poetics. It presents a unique framework for crafting poetry and literary texts that embrace the concept of polysituatedness, emphasizing the significance of multiple locations in the creative process. Kinsella's insights encourage readers to reflect on how diverse settings influence artistic expression and the human experience.