New Poetry with Audio!

Donald Revell
Stephen Burt
Paul Hoover
Jonah Winter
Cathy Wagner
Reginald Shepherd
Nin Andrews
Sophia Kartsonis
Sandra Miller
Joshua Harmon
Devin Johnston
Chuck Zerby
Sara Henning
Ognjen Smiljanic
Lance Phillips
Peter Drake
Kathleen Byrne
Ernest Hilbert
Garth Greenwell
Marc McKee

Criticism

Brian Henry on Kinsella
Gabriel Welsch on Northrop
Gabriel Welsch on Smith
Cecily Iddings on Ruefle
Christopher McDermott on Wenderoth

He Disappears...

Auto by John Kinsella. Cambridge/Perth: Salt Publishing, 2001. $12.95.

Auto as in autopsy, autodidact, auto-

matic, autonomy, autobiography:

picking through the dead for the cause,

self-taught, mechanical or involuntary,

independent, the story of a life by

the one who led it.

1/5 of his way into the book,

Kinsella asks “Where am I in this?”

If I reach  for Philippe Lejeune’s take

on autobiography – “a retrospective

prose narrative that someone writes

concerning his own existence, where the focus

is his individual life, in particular the story

of his personality” – I can read Auto

as the story not of Kinsella

but of Kinsella’s personality.

In the book he says he is what he reads,

has read, writes, has written. And he is.

He is a fiction – here in the book

and there in Cambridge as he writes it.

Re-reading Auto the thought of a bodiless body

emerges. So many drugs and fluids,

you can see why he feared flesh and its waste

so long. The body less efficient than the land.

The contradictions he was he explores,

and succeeds in holding up the dead birds,

the exploded hive, the blackouts

while clinging to ethics (vegan, pacificist, anarchist).

Avoids hypocrisy through self-implication.

The shaved cunt, his body on the edges

of the gay nightlife in Perth, overdose.

Auto blends prose narrative with verse,

also includes letters and emails.

Hyper-hybrid text, androgynous.

Kinsella the I, he, and you,

in the past and the present at once.

“Shattered / sheets of ice disperse

reflection”;

“hot snow, the frozen centre.”

“Australia” still young: occupation,

settlement, subjugation, the ensuing guilt,

which (Kinsella admits) is useless.

The violence of men: he was stabbed

with a rusty knife, his bike thrown

into the river; beaten by men he owed

money to; almost killed by dealers.

Anti-chronological, all time in Auto is

the present, and thus no time.

The Wheatlands in WA and Cambridge

create a single landscape. To escape from one

is to become trapped by the other,

no matter how far away he gets.

The book is built on the past, the dead;

ghosts arrive as Kinsella writes –

the animals he killed and saw

killed, the rivers and wells, his friends,

his parents, his own body (three times) –

such that I do not resist his statement

“I have chosen to live” at Auto’s end.

This book covering a life is so full

of death, he earns this affirmation

even as he, the author, disappears.

Brian Henry’s On James Tate is forthcoming from University of Michigan Press.