John Kinsella

Elfie Shiosaki’s new book of poetry, Refugia, is remarkable. Her scholarly archival reading of the military enterprise that was the “settling” of the Swan River Colony is an insightful glimpse into the nature of colonial invasion that melds …

“Riding his pushy fast out of town, really upset after arguing with his best friend, Angus almost rides into a bloke with a shotgun. Watch where you’re going kid, says the large man. He’s wearing a jacket that isn’t suited to the burning …”

The anti-nuclear protests of the 1980s are a distant memory in Fremantle, which hosts an American Virginia-class submarine of the sort promised under the AUKUS deal.

This Consequence, the new album from platinum-selling metalcore band Killswitch Engage, is exacting and accomplished.

“When I lived on the edge of the plain tucked up against The Scarp, an orchard on the northern bank of the thin river was my point of repair. The orchardist lived in a shed among his equipment and chemicals, his clothes drying on his tractor. He …”

Amyl and the Sniffers’ new album, Cartoon Darkness, sees a band growing into its promise as it grapples with success.

“People write this city to ensure it exists and they existed within it. But not you. You are on the edges, in spaces that lack definition. Even locals don’t give them a name.”

“Every tree that survives this image-crumbling dry spell is statutory, and those holding on to layers of story        on that targeted “farmland”, surviving the record-keeping        as much a record-making, …”

Cento Sonnet à la P. VERGILIVS MARO I Let me make this final effort to work the fields without damage, Arethusa, before the media flee from the work, never claiming the land though “she” favours its people over …

Rock duo Sleater-Kinney’s new album, Little Rope, explores feelings of loss in songs layered with contradictions, complexity and wildness.

“I have almost no words for snow.   I wonder about the wavelength and imperfections of snow and snowing.   I contemplate snow-jobs.   The fractures on the outer glass of the double-glazed skylight keep me awake …”

Chalice Mining is seeking partners to develop a massive ‘green metals’ deposit near the Julimar Conservation Park in Western Australia. Poet John Kinsella is seeking assurances that the region’s unique ecology will be protected.

“In front of Gabrielle d’Estrées et une de ses soeurs, an older woman is pinching a younger woman’s right nipple. Another woman is photographing them. The women are clothed. They are obviously imitating the painting but it is …”

Drawing from her dialect verse novel, Orlam, PJ Harvey’s spellbinding new album, I Inside the Old Year Dying, bristles with sublimity.

Metallica’s latest album brings all the energies of the band’s contradictions to a sense of middle-age crisis.

Across the many modes of David McCooey’s fifth collection of poetry, The Book of Falling, there is one compelling voice that easily fuses irony and lament: the voice of “the poet”. I don’t necessarily mean McCooey himself, but rather …

Iggy Pop’s new album, Every Loser, is one of the great albums of its type – and its type is Iggy Pop.

“It’s not the ghost of the poet or his sad wife in the tower by the rushing water that we are looking for: sensation, awareness, presence. No, that’s circumstantial. It’s a bird, a rare bird we are hoping to spot to rewrite the truth …”

The Chats’ album Get Fucked emerges from a particularly Australian history of self-mocking political punk.

In his 14th collection, Harvest Lingo, Murri poet Lionel Fogarty continues his decades-long commitment to disrupting colonial language, colonial thought and their machineries of oppression. Fogarty creates poems in which language is liberated, …

“My great-grandmother interpreted as she played, or played from a score in the flickering light. How would she have run with this? Single mother, migrant, royalist, leftover Huguenot.  That lusty ethereal necromancer priest, the general stuffed into …”

This is an essential gathering and representative selection from the vast body of Judith Wright’s nonfiction. It is well organised into thematic sections, with each essay, article and extract from longer work introduced precisely and briefly. Georgina …

I have spent decades tussling with the poetry of Les Murray, just as I did in my friendly but contending and disputing personal interactions with him. This book of “last poems”, based on “three-quarter’s of a book’s worth” of poems respectfully …

“Between freeway and shopping precinct / Widowmakers throw limbs onto car roofs / And windscreens while a flock of a dozen / White-tailed black cockatoos counterpoint / The squalls coming from the north / Before setting off parallel to a thousand cars …”

“The house won’t stand without foundations of trust / and the town won’t work if people guard only their own. / The insomnia that racks your life is a strange greed of wakefulness / so difficult to shake in the lateness where body eats dark and light …”

“I am a dressmaker who does alterations to make a living. You might call me a tailor, but what would you know? How long would you spend down here in the heat, working 12-hour shifts? And this is better than when I worked in the shop with 30 others doing …”