The Graphology Poems are a ‘life-long’ poetry cycle of semiotics begun over a quarter of a century ago. This multiplicious and diverging cycle and sub-cycles of poems uses handwriting, textuality, orthography, and considerations of prosody, to consider issues of human rights, justice, ethics, politics, environment, animal rights, questions around the purpose of art, music, writing and creativity, forms of activism and the nature of knowledge. This is the second, expanded edition of Graphology Poems 1995-2015, and includes all the poems in the original Five Islands Press three-volume edition, plus some of the uncollected Graphology poems of the same period, a reproduction of the holograph Runes notebook, and a lengthy updated foreword by the author, an introduction by Nicholas Birns and ‘outroduction’ and interview with the author by Jonathan Dunk, edited into a single volume by Gareth Jenkins.

About the author:

John Kinsella is the author of many books of poetry, fiction and criticism. He has also written for the stage. He is a frequent collaborator with other poets, critics, fictionalists, artists, musicians, labourers, activists and friends. Recent fiction includes the novels Lucida Intervalla (UWAP, 2018) and Hollow Earth (Transit Lounge, 2019) and the collections of short fiction Old Growth (Transit Lounge, 2017) and Pushing Back (Transit Lounge, 2021); recent poetry includes Drowning in Wheat: Selected Poems (Picador, 2016), Open Door (UWAP, 2018), Insomnia (WW Norton, 2020) and Supervivid Depastoralism (Vagabond, 2021); recent criticism includes Polysituatedness (Manchester University Press, 2017), Temporariness (with Russell West-Pavlov; Narr, 2019) and Beyond Ambiguity: tracing literary sites of activism (Manchester University Press, 2021). Five Islands Press has just published his collection of Graphology drawing-poems, Saussure’s Kaleidoscope (2021).

 John Kinsella is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, and Emeritus Professor of Literature and Sustainability at Curtin University. But most relevantly, he is an anarchist-vegan-pacifist. Kinsella’s activism against racism and bigotry began in his late teens when he was working on the first manifestation of his experimental novel, Morpheus. He is a committed environmentalist.