Free Radicals

John Kinsella -- vegan, anarchist, activist pacifist, and poet -- threads together what the powerful prefer to keep apart.

With fierce lyricism and intellectual clarity, Kinsella confronts the entangled violences of empire, colonialism, and contemporary global capitalism: 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.

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.