AustLit

'That poet John Kinsella is abrasive as a ­xanthorrhoea, electrically sensitive as a platypus bill and self-reflexively across all issues of the anthropocene is by now well integrated into his writing identity. With Open Door, the third of his Jam Tree Gully cycle, we find him returning to his family’s rural block on Ballardong Noongar land in Western Australia’s vast wheatbelt. In the place he loves and hates the most Kinsella immediately finds “a Dry as ­combustible as morality”, forcing him to fit his theme of homecoming and return through a penitential lens of empathy and rage, as he ­observes the ongoing effects of agricultural cauterisation of the landscape and the suffering of creatures in his midst. This is the poet as ­activist-crusader and student of animals, once again exhibiting his membership of a species increasingly tortured by its own culpability. As such, Open Door is ironically caged, not only by the obviousness of climate change, the bleeding obvious, but by how to write about it in the face of what amounts to a culturally arthritic denial.' (Publication summary)