Aporia - by John Kinsella (Paperback)

About the Book

"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 collection searching for logic where logic is hard to find or maybe can't be found. From the death of the poet's father, to considering the complex, troubled, and often distressing relationship between humans and non-human life, and through a sense of ghosts being materially present even when we doubt their existence, we undertake a journey in which reality and creative conception are in tension. This tension is embodied in the figure of the poet Hèolderlin, and also through moments in Ovid's Metamorphosis, ongoing obsessions for Kinsella which he constantly circles back to, reconsiders, and departs from. Whether conversing with ghosts or the living, with animals or plants, these are poems concerned with transformative relationships with and within the "natural world." Kangaroos, echidnas, ducks, owls, deer, slow worms, and many other creatures from around the world inhabit these pages, finding their own way through to autonomy and self-declaration as the poet argues with himself over the dynamics of life and death"--

Book Synopsis

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 collection
searching for logic where logic is hard to find or maybe can't be found. From
the death of the poet's father, to considering the complex, troubled, and often
distressing relationship between humans and non-human life, and through a sense
of ghosts being materially present even when we doubt their existence, we
undertake a journey in which reality and creative conception are in tension.
This tension is embodied in the figure of the poet Hölderlin, and also through
moments in Ovid's Metamorphosis, ongoing obsessions for Kinsella which
he constantly circles back to, reconsiders, and departs from. Whether
conversing with ghosts or the living, with animals or plants, these are poems
concerned with transformative relationships with and within the "natural world."
Kangaroos, echidnas, ducks, owls, deer, slow worms, and many other creatures
from around the world inhabit these pages, finding their own way through to
autonomy and self-declaration as the poet argues with himself over the dynamics
of life and death.

Review Quotes

"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]

About the Author

John Kinsella's most recent volumes of poetry include Drowning in Wheat: Selected Poems 1980-2015 (Picador, 2016), Firebreaks (W.W. Norton, 2016), and Insomnia (W.W. Norton, 2020). His recent poetry book with Kwame Dawes is UnHistory (Peepal Tree, 2022). The first two volumes of his collected poems have appeared in Australia (2022 and 2023) with the third appearing in 2025. In 2025 W.W. Norton will publish The Darkest Pastoral: Selected Poems with an introduction by Marjorie Perloff, and his major anthology, The Uncollected Animals: Poems for Our Nonhuman Kin, will appear from Turtle Point Press. 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.