Overview

Have a talk with a ghost or a duck or contest the destroyers of the land, listen to the roos and slow worms, marvel and question and rage and love the language with John Kinsella's Aporia. Aporia is a collectionsearching for logic where logic is hard to find or maybe can't be found. Fromthe death of the poet's father, to considering the complex, troubled, and oftendistressing relationship between humans and non-human life, and through a senseof ghosts being materially present even when we doubt their existence, weundertake a journey in which reality and creative conception are in tension.This tension is embodied in the figure of the poet Hlderlin, and also throughmoments in Ovid's Metamorphosis, ongoing obsessions for Kinsella whichhe constantly circles back to, reconsiders, and departs from. Whetherconversing with ghosts or the living, with animals or plants, these are poemsconcerned with transformative relationships with and within the ""natural world.""Kangaroos, echidnas, ducks, owls, deer, slow worms, and many other creaturesfrom around the world inhabit these pages, finding their own way through toautonomy and self-declaration as the poet argues with himself over the dynamicsof life and death.

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9781885586285

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Reviews

“Every page in Aporia is both a tree leaf and a poem leaf. John Kinsella’s poems commune with jellyfish, kangaroos, possums, worms, dingoes, and willows, an ecstatic and mournful translation among life forms. Opening with a lament for the father and closing with the dying father and the poet’s own ghostliness, Aporia shows Kinsella ‘losing the landscape but finding the land,’ finding new poetic form in the rhythms of nature under threat, and in passionate protest, finding ‘what rights to speak.’ A visionary, wise, and generous book.” —Rosanna Warren, author of So Forth “With this new collection, John Kinsella proves once again that he is one of the most profound and poignant environmental writers of our precarious times.” —Craig Santos Perez, National Book Award-winning author of from unincorporated territory [åmot]

Author Information

John Kinsella's most recent volumes of poetry include The Darkest Pastoral: Selected Poems with an introduction by Marjorie Perloff (W.W. Norton, 2025), and the anthology The Uncollected Animals: Poems for Our Nonhuman Kin (Turtle Point Press, 2025). His recent poetry book with Kwame Dawes is Mortality (Peepal Tree, 2024). His three volumes of collected poems have appeared in Australia (UWA Publishing). He is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University; an Affiliated Scholar with Kenyon College; and Emeritus Professor of Literature and Environment at Curtin University, Western Australia.

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