On the State of Things — An Anarchist-Pacifist Statement for a Leaderless World

John Kinsella

As each of us, no matter where we are in the world or what circumstances we live under, tries to come to grips with a collapsing biosphere and human injustice towards fellow humans and towards ‘nature’, we are confronted with the issues of people making decisions for themselves or on ‘our behalf’ that frequently offend or distress us, that go against all we believe in. Many people are suffering obvious and horrendous abuse and deprivation, are in conflict zones, suffering state-driven, social or domestic violence, suffering from criminal (for self-gain) exploitation, experiencing marginalisation or bigotry from people or institutions in the majority or far more empowered than themselves, or live in poverty or reduced circumstances. 

The obviousness of all this is not an excuse to dismiss as ‘realpolitik’ or with ‘it was always thus’ stock sayings. The wrongs are not addressed by a fatalism of ‘the human condition’. Each of us might also have our ideas or theories about how to address wrongs on micro and macro levels, and many of us are trying or will try to live lives that reduce our corrosive impact of presence on others and on the biosphere. It goes without saying that some people will try to exploit for self-gain, or even for their own politics of personal, familial, national, and bespoke ‘community-mindedness’ above and beyond others. Into this will be woven the bandwidths of selfishness through to ‘loyalty’ (at the exclusion of other loyalties), but in the end such exclusionism of the outside one’s own belonging or orientation will lead to exploitation or bigotry on some level or other. 

My personal concerns are to find a way around such exclusions, and to work on a respectful collective-communal decision-making that doesn’t diminish other communities and their connections to the biosphere, to specific places, to specific associations with others, to spiritual belief systems (or spiritual de-systeming). This is an anarchist positionality, of course, but at the core of this is a belief on my part that ‘leaders’ are inevitably part of any problem of diminished rights and unfair distribution of ‘wealth’. 

As someone who also advocates for animals and eco-systems’ rights in both empathy and totemic interaction through/by/with humans, but also an independence of ‘being’ (a respect for the ‘animalness’ of an animal, for example), I include ecological and ‘personal’ animal quiddity and rights in these discussions. ‘Leaders’ in communities might function in a quasi-representative way in which they are spokespeople for a group, but hold no real power and cannot make decisions that control and/or oppress others. I am not talking about that dynamic here. I am referring to leaders who make unilateral decisions that are not uniquely and completely discussed with their community of representation. 

It would seem that no political model outside anarchism achieves this. Every decision being one of mutual understanding and mutual aid, every choice one of collective affirmation. Once a leader is separated from that process, they are in essence a form of dictator. Sure, a leader operating with more checks and balances than one operating with few or none is only nominally acting as a dictator as opposed to the out-and-out dictator whose command system is entirely centred on their whim and response to any stimuli. But, essentially, with a leader who is not nominal, a leader who has the power to make decisions as even representative of their constituents without being in constant communication with all those constituents who could in an instant say ‘that person is not speaking for us’, then we are dealing with degrees of dictatorship. 

Involved in this capacity for taking on the mantle of speaking for others who are distant from oneself is a belief that one can do so with principle and affirmation of having been chosen in the first place. There are degrees of choosing, from the small group selecting a spokesperson to the nation-state electing a government who selects a leader from their ranks, or direct election of a president, say, who the electors know has dictatorial tendencies. Leadership is something enforced through fiscal control, martial backing, and access to exclusive knowledge (‘security’). 

As I hear leaders say that a nation (or any national ‘sovereignty’), for example, ‘has a right to defend itself’, I have to ask myself what defence is, as I have done since my late teens. ‘Defence’ is a quality of violence. ‘Defence’ is entwined with ‘attack’ and not really its opposite (maybe more a theoretical ‘counterpoint’). ‘Defence’ is the right to strike first as the ‘best form of defence’. ‘Defence’ is the quality of a colonial beachhead expanding into ‘hostile territory’, and living by constant pre-emptive action. Or when ‘defence’ is more literal (as in a nation-state being attacked by another), it can so quickly become ‘flexible’ to incorporate acts of aggression that extend far outside its earlier response/defend definition.

All nation-states have at some point or another formed out of military presence and maintain themselves through the same. Nation-states are built on values of control and oppression. Australia-as-nation is an example of that predictable claim of fair ‘treatment’ of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islands peoples via the state’s elected and appointed leaders and the institutions they are extensions of and embedded in. A faux ‘fairness’ to the very people who were dispossessed by colonialism... and many of whom experience an ongoing state of psychological and material siege. 

As someone who strongly advocates for a ‘no-state’ approach to habitation of the world (communities rather than nations), and for the rights to co-inhabit land with respect for difference and with mutual support/aid, and for the valorisation of and full respect for any traditional relationship to country (and for complete intactness of those Indigenous relationships to country) while allowing for the peaceful co-existence of those with different connectivities with place (including newcomers — ‘migrants’... a word that is manipulated depending on where one sits in the equation of movement and ‘settling’), I see the core offence in the unthinkable hatred between communities around ‘Israel’ and ‘Palestine’ as arising from ‘leaders’ and ‘nation states’. The powerful nation-state of Israel is using its military power to control, oppress and destroy its constructed ‘enemy’.

Once organised into financial-military blocks of difference, with religious leadership and control over peoples’ lives being attended covertly or directly with the state/s, these ideas of nation establish conflict, apartheid and exclusion from their very inceptions, be that more recently or hundreds or thousands of years ago. Identity built out of exclusion risks conflict and the exploitation of an eternalised ‘other’. This should not be happening on any level.

This generalisation can extend to Ukraine and Russia, or anywhere else, allowing for the highly specific inflections of history and disintegration between larger community demographics over time. Each ‘case’ of hate is different, but behind them is the ‘leader’ or ‘leaders’ (from government to military, from ‘church to state’, and so on) making unilateral decisions for collective situations. 

As fascism consolidates itself in Israel, the United States, Russia, China, Italy, Hungary, Iran, North Korea (with strong tendencies in the South as well), Ukraine (try being a pacifist in Ukraine under the present military regime... Ukraine is experiencing a colonial invasion, but it is also embracing the values of ‘leadered’ militarism and a cessation of tolerance for contrary views on achieving peace).... it hovers around the edges of the militarism of the UK, Canada, Australia, France, Germany and so many other countries where it is participatory and exploiting through internal oppressions and bigotries, control over adversarial voices (especially in the arts and ‘humanities’), the manufacturing and sale of armaments, and the compliance of leadership with the power and ‘bonuses’ (or withholdings) of superpower leadership. 

If a ‘business leader’ such as Elon Musk can wield as much power as the Robber Barons or, say, Alfred Krupp and his company, and use a spuriously ‘free’ social media platform as an extension of power to gather ‘like minds’ to form ‘posses’ of social bullying and control, then that leadership speaks for itself (and, perversely, proudly). Or The Dictator with his military parades, penchant for gift acceptance from corrupt and exploitive regimes akin to his own positionality, simply creating his own social media bullying platform. Leaders empower themselves beyond their initial ‘support’ and vectors into public office with guns (the bottom line), and guns rule the world. 

Those who deny genocide is happening in Gaza (and other parts of the world — in those places off the Western media radar), those who deny the massive number of weapons-related deaths throughout the world, those who deny that the destruction of habitat is a participatory mass-extinction event, and those who see themselves as being morally, culturally or ethnically superior to others, are emboldened by leaders who either embrace similar ideologies or who essentially cover for them, allowing them to feel ‘represented’ in their hate. Leaders exist because we allow them to be leaders and we have established systems and platforms to ensure such leadership. 

If we fail to:

— completely disarm

— to respect country and Indigenous claims whilst allowing for the free (borderless) movements of peoples (with respect to bio-protections to prevent the destruction of habitat — and this to be conducted on a voluntary/shared basis without punitive actions)

— to de-martialise policing so that small community groups manage their own ‘policing’ in non-violent and non-punitive ways

— to create universal healthcare on all levels, to deny anyone leadership roles beyond being spokespeople

— to reduce mining to the bare essentials for life and to de-industrialise (a slow process... but let’s start with de-nuclearising and de-fossil fuelling)

— to redistribute wealth fairly

— to start nurturing all that remains of old-growth forests and committing to an ideation of vast replanting and habitat restoration

— to end the abuses and destructiveness of industrial agriculture and animal exploitation

— to detoxify ecologies 

— to work through a sharing/barter communalism

— respect diversity of belief and respect diversity in all our communities

— end/renounce capitalism (which accords with all of the above)

then injustice will grow rather than reduce, and some will have much and others will be lost to the world. 

Every person has a right to be their own leader, and to enjoy their own communities without abuse.

The Brutality of the Live Sheep Export Industry

As a vegan, I clearly oppose all raising of animals for slaughter, but the live sheep export industry is a particularly cruel and egregious form of animal 'husbandry'. There is much evidence to show how much the sheep suffer on these 'livestock ships', and how many die horrible deaths through the (di)stress of transit. It has been grotesque for me to watch the 'keep the sheep' (euphemism if ever there was one!) campaign in Western Australia during the Federal election. It has been borderline aggressive at times and almost as confronting as the trade itself. This was a campaign based not on the usual 'feeding the world' scenario, but purely on vested interests and profits. There are other ways of farming. 

What's more, it's a furphy to keep identifying 'the rural' with the business interests of animal farming for slaughter. 'The rural' is far more complex than this, and the descriptor rarely includes alternative farming methods, non-conservative views on land interaction, the concerns of Indigenous peoples, and the myriad points of view that make up any community ('rural', 'urban', 'hybrid' or 'fringe'). Here is a poem written in response to the aggro campaign which often segued with the almost feverish desire to dilute anti-gun ownership laws.

Graphology Causality 31

 

If I’m the asymptote

            then I’m caught

in an offset to grain-

train heavy metal

            graffiti animation

            just as the corellas

flock a turning point,

ogonek to the greater

            circle of paddock

            propaganda: e.g. ‘keep

the sheep’ when they mean

‘live export the sheep’

            for slaughter:

            articles

and determiners, aggressive

ploys of an election.

 

 

During the election campaign, I wrote to both conservative candidates in this electorate to ask them to please stop nailing placards to the roadside trees in the wheatbelt (some of the placards on trees uncommon in the region) — interestingly, the Nationals candidate was responsive and courteous, saying that she'd issue instructions for it to be stopped (and I didn't see any new nailings after this)... while the Liberal Party of Australia candidate ignored my email and the signs remain nailed to trees. 

We might strongly disagree on issues (including the above!), but if communication is not considered worthwhile (because of different views?), then a very basic courtesy of the agora is ignored, and community damaged further by such indifference. Even with those I ethically oppose, I hope for peaceful, 'informed discussion'. 

My contestation is always pacifist and inclusive, and I will dialogue with all those I oppose in respectful ways rather than deny or ignore them. We can make this better, can't we?

            John Kinsella

 

Experimental Film 3 — Max Planck subset

This film is also part of a series of poem-films I have been creating as a subset of my Graphology poetry cycle/project that has been going since the mid-90s. As mentioned in the prior posting, these films are subsections of a 'feature-length' experimental movie that is focalised through the poet Hölderlin, glasshouses, gardens, colonialism, AI, animal rights, industrialism and climate degradation, and issues of environment, human rights and 'place'. 

This 'section' arose out of living near the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (oh, the irony!), and investigating the vivisection that ultimately underpins so much Max Planck laboratory research (by varying degrees of separation, or not). Via The German Reference Centre for Ethics in the Life Sciences (DRZE) website, see. 

Recently, I wrote to one prominent university neuroscientist to object to his inserting electrodes into crows' brains to 'show conscious processes in bird brains'. And though there's been a relatively recent shift in the use/abuse of primates by the Max Planck research facilities (I wrote protest-intervention poems about this horrendous abuse when I was in Tübingen in 2016), the disregard for non-human life goes deep (always 'justified' as being for the ultimate benefit of 'humankind', while disclaiming the suffering of the animals themselves through deploying hierarchical and abusive/demeaning speciesist arguments). For a deeply disturbing article regarding the lengths vivisectors will go to to keep their death programmes functioning, see this. 

There's also a figurative (and literal via the observatory dome which is almost the omphalos of the institute) astronomical subtext... when I was a child, I wanted to be an astronomer... as the power plant in the 'background' spews waste. The underlying 'soundtrack' or 'voice-under' is Emily Brontë's poem 'No Coward Soul is Mine'.

    John Kinsella

Ecological Benefits Propositions

1. People are ecologically minded to serve their own ends

2. People believe that they have an intrinsic right over an ecology whether or not they have a totemic relationship with that ecology

3. People will damage an ecology to improve their own ecology or the ecology of their perceived community

4. People will address a social injustice that does not directly concern themselves through aligning it with protection of ecology but not if that ecology serves their own powerbase, even indirectly

5. People separate social injustice from justice to ecologies

6. Oppressive power structures will ‘trickle down’ benefits from the exploitation of ecologies while receiving minimum side-effects for themselves while maximising proximity-damage to those who are oppressed

7. Ecological activism will benefit the activist directly or indirectly, even when it benefits us all: this paradox is the empathetically just position designed to be incontestable

8. Ecologies rarely get to speak for ecologies and only do where their direct Indigenous or traditional interlocutors are given a voice over their protection and well-being

9. All being of ecologies give us all equal part and concern in their fate and yet the benefits from damage are lopsided and based on a series of oppressions worked through ‘race’, ‘class’, ‘gender’, and control

10. Ecology is aligned with dwelling and habitation and yet the houses of non-human species are undone or transposed to transfer power from ecology to certain humans or groups of humans

11. Human social structures make control of ecology more effective in order to control subordinate or peripheral parts of those social structures themselves

12. To claim authority and construct laws that have a central alignment with power will undo any ‘rights’ they legislate through controlling the nature of those rights (and the provenance of their being ‘granted’) — and this applies to the ‘protection’ of ecologies that then become reliant on the power demographics in the systems ‘offering’ that protection. Rights are inherent and beyond legislation which consumes those rights in underlying agendas

13. The elevating of human over animals in a conceptual sense will always mean animals will suffer not because humans should be respected less but because animals aren’t respected more — in the same way, ecologies being respected more can’t mean humans are respected less

14. The exploitation of individuals and groups of humans by other individuals and groups of humans (especially through institutions, state apparatuses, and larger social mechanism) relies on control and manipulation of ecologies — removing control over ecologies and allowing them to regain aspects of their autonomy lessens the ability of humans to create structures to systematically control, oppress and impose their ‘law’ on other humans.

John Kinsella

Poem for the Present Generation of Vegan Activists Peacefully Intervening to Save Animals

I am here now

            for the young vegan activists saving animals from slaughter

I am here now

because a young human

interrupted my journey to the slaughtering,

hoisted me over their shoulders

and carried me towards animation.

I am here now

my eyes dilating fast

to take in this extension

to life — and the blood of my kin

is a river never divided.

I am here now

because an intervention

drew out the length of my days;

the things I have learnt we have taken —

we breathe the same air as our dead.

I am here now

because the young humans

are rising peacefully from their screens

to step into the killing zones,

to bend down and lift us back to the light.

            John Kinsella

Note: I hope the tags for this entry say something, too.

Veganism and Animal Rights, and Vigilantism and Farming Communities in Western Australia

I sent this letter to the Western Australian Police Commissioner and the Premier of Western Australia early last week. I want to add that the W.A. mainstream media coverage of veganism and animal rights issues in Western Australia has generally been rabid and paranoid, and part of a disturbing far-right stirring of nationalism that aims for aggressive suppression of any challenge to the industry.

Dear Police Commissioner

I wish to protest the ‘support’ given by police (as seen in today’s news) to a member of the public who discharged a weapon near people who were filming animals on his property. The moment the use of a weapon in any capacity is given the okay, you have opened the door to injury or worse — advertent or inadvertent.

I have no connection to the activists in question; I do not know them.

To side with the animal farmers against the vegan animal rights activists is not the police’s remit — the police’s remit is to uphold the law. There is no room for moral intrusion in this process — you cannot take sides. Doing so contributes to polarising and hardening differences, rather than helping toward understanding.

Activists’ intrusions can be legally dealt with according to law — and should the activists wish to change things, they need to work to change the laws. No one should feel threatened in this.

One could argue that animals’ rights are part of this as well, and I would, but I recognise that until laws are changed there are ways to go about these things that respect people as well as animals. No doubt. But not to charge someone using a weapon in the vicinity of people no matter how enraged, or even if the weapon-user feels ‘threatened’, is unacceptable by the laws you yourself uphold.

I have been a vegan for approximately thirty-three years, and my wife for twenty-five years, and we live in the wheatbelt. We live alongside others amicably, which doesn’t mean we all always agree on everything. Ours is not to bully or cajole others, but to live our lives decently and offer an example of a different way of living on the planet. Many have been influenced by our choices, not because we have bullied them, but because we haven’t. As such, animals benefit as well.

It is not right to threaten, deride, or humiliate others in any circumstances, even if one feels they are doing wrong. It’s s slippery slope in both directions.

So I would ask you to stand up against vigilantism and respect non-aggressive vegans and animal rights people as much as you do those who farm animals, and certainly more than those who are armed and make threats (and yes, wielding firearms around people is a form of threat).

Police actions in this have made us feel vulnerable, as if farmers are being encouraged into aligning against vegans, and we shouldn’t have to feel that way. We don’t make others feel vulnerable, and are known to respect difference. Your job surely is to uphold the law, and not to cast judgement.

Sincerely,

John Kinsella

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Siobhan Hodge and Justice for Romeo

This is a launch speech I did a few months ago for Siobhan's Hodge's new poetry book, Justice for Romeo. Though as a vegan activist I don't ride horses now (not since my late teens), I respect and acknowledge that Siobhan (like others) has committed her life to the betterment and well-being of horses, and is more activist on their behalf than anyone I've ever met. I consider this to be one of the poetry books of the year, so I list it here by name (I get asked to do these lists and this is where I'll mention this fine work).

­Sinews — On Siobhan Hodge’s Justice for Romeo 

Advocacy, elegy, and a deep respect for horses are the sinews running through this book of poetry. And ‘love’ — by which I don’t mean the false love that Siobhan Hodge notes in her preface as being extended to horses as a kind of ‘well-meaning’ though mistaken fetishisation and objectification, but rather as a genuine affection for the uniqueness and difference/s of horses. This is no book of anthropomorphic projection, but of seeing and hearing, of sharing life with horses. Though horse life is not contingent on humans, there’s been a timeless interaction between horses and humans, sadly, mainly with humans exploiting horses. In her remarkable work, Justice for Romeo, Siobhan Hodge considers the complex nature of human-horse interactions, and especially her own interactions with horses since childhood. It is not about objectification, but self-scrutiny and self-searching as to how Siobhan has situated herself in these interactions. In essence, these are dialogues of trust, of call and response, of elation and disappointment, of miscommunications. And further, it is not a romanticised version of human-horse relationships, but a complex and often troubled one.

Through reflections on the distance between depicting the horse in art and the ‘inspiration’ in quotidian matter-of-factness, the utility of the horse in — say — the world of the ancient Greeks, or of the 18^th-century English painter of horses, George Stubbs, there is an overwhelming sense of slippage in the poems between the real lives of horses and how we use and see them. Some artists are sensitive to it, giving horses different expressions for different moods; others are so distracted by aesthetics that they move through the horror of corpses, through the anatomies, with a ‘scientific eye’, and an eye to their art. So, Siobhan’s poem ‘Stubbs’ is a powerful challenge to placing aesthetics over life and marks the distance between seeing and compassion. I admire the empathy of this book, but also its hard-nosed critique of human abuse of horses, its confronting the disturbances.

The use of horses for sport, or in war, or as transport, and in so many other ways, leads to an expression of not only guilt in this book, but a furious sense of advocacy. Nothing is whispered in speaking back to other humans about the wrongs of exploitation. But there’s also the respect and the out-and-out understanding that can be expressed by horse and human. Siobhan is able to express this redemptive and enriching spirituality in ways I have encountered in no other poetry.

Throughout the various short, swift, and concise sections of the book, there is an intense physicality. Relationship between rider and horse is necessarily physical, and often risky. There are accidents in here — to rider and horse. They are lamented, critiqued, recorded. But what comes of it is the equality between embodiments — the horse’s body and the human body are deserving of equal respect, and equal marvel. If the rider goes with the horse, and does not bully and cajole, there is the chance of communication that is respectfully and non-invasively physical, as well, as yes, spiritual. What I so respect about Hodge’s ‘spirituality’ as expressed in this work is that it is universal, not constrained by a machine of belief. Hodge has a purpose here ­— to translate the conditions under which horses, individually and collectively, live when in contact with humans.

One of the most remarkable poems in the collection is ‘Przewalski’s Pelts’ in which we consider — no, more than consider... we engage with the fate of the Mongolian horse as ‘breed’, but also as individuals, as bodies and souls. So under threat, with their ‘rebirth’ measured in terms of a couple of remaining horses, they have strangely and somewhat disturbingly thrived in the fallout zone around Chernobyl, which has been designated a nature reserve only because it can’t be used for anything else. In recent years, the herd had reached two hundred individuals, but poachers have much diminished the herd. This entry into the fallout zone to profit, to ‘murder’, reflects on the human condition in dreadful, catastrophic ways. In these horses is hope, as well as agency.

Siobhan Hodge doesn’t see herself as holier than thou, though she speaks from great empathy and authority. She also sees herself as complicit — complicit in not being able to stop the slaughter, the use and abuse of ‘horse flesh’, its consignment to the glue factory when past its profitable days. I say ‘its’, because its personhood has been denied it — from being seen as living organism to an almost worthless commodity that needs changing into something useful. In a superb trilogy of prose poems, ‘Zebra’, Hodge takes us on a picture-shooting safari through encounters with zebras: her admiration, her awe, her point of contact, her epiphanies, her distress, our shame. As in so many of the poems, ‘skin’ and ‘hair’ are so important — they are the points of contact for horses and people — and it’s as skin and hair in the airport when departing that the persona becomes closest to the zebra:

‘...zebras aren’t big sellers alive, after all. Guide has better targets to net. A clearer shot will come later, from the airport. I found you, by Departures, crisp bodies flat and shining under lights between the gates. Tufts and bristles.’

The body reduced to ‘signage’ for tourists — the most brutal of hollow signifiers. I am disturbed by the inherent threat in the ‘seeing’ (hunting is never far away from ‘watching’ in the world of trophyism) and Siobhan configures this tension perfectly (in terms of the workings of the poem).

One of the remarkable things about Siobhan Hodge’s advocacy of horses, uncompromising and partisan as it is, is that she also manages great cultural respect and sensitivity towards human communities. Hers is not an obvious poetry — its pared back, impacted style is so strongly drawn from the fragmentary remains of Sappho’s poetry, and a scholarship that has fully comprehended the value of space around a poem — that even ‘missing’ bits of a poem, the lacunae, are essential to our reading of the world of the past, and in the here and now.

In communicating and communing with horses (as far as a horse will allow!), there are necessarily gaps and spaces, and it’s in these than the figurative generativeness of Siobhan’s verse might be found. Also, her use of the short impacted line allows a riding poem like ‘In the Pines’, where rider and horse are ‘we’, to find a way through an often inclement environment, following the path, the journey, acquiring knowledge and dealing together with threat, stating and contemplating both beauty and trauma, involved in a call and response relationship between each other, the place, and us, the readers. And the whole time, the intensity and precision of the language draw us into the place, the scenario, the relationship, compelled under and between the pines:

Collective space in shadow,

your black coat nips

encroaching sunset,

throw the lens astray

at lines we do not own

in fallen trees. Soaked

needles, lost maps and each

breath shared...

and we feel the heartbeat under the ribs, the closeness.

I’m frequently fascinated by the shift between (displaced) ‘point of view’ of horse and human in the interaction. There are times in some of the ‘riding’ poems, where the horse is being made to perform and we slip into the horse’s sense of things, that the work opens genuinely new ways of insight into humans per humans. Yet the horse is always allowed to be itself, not co-opted; the book explores issues of appropriation in so many ways. It’s also about the uses of history and the occlusion of humans by other (predatory) humans’ activities; it is also the horse-realm as well. Parallel and intersecting worlds. I am still pondering the ‘whip’ and its tyranny of control, and there seems to be confessions of culpability and guilt as well as accusation in there. The book is a confession and an analysis, a prayer and a recounting.

I — we — might also admire that the work analyses a different quality of ‘love’ and affection and ‘sharing’ outside the human-to-human, without appropriating the animal into an exploitative situation. To have familial warmth is not to use or abuse or to be entertained, but to be gratified by the existence of the horse. Those people who use animals for financial or physical or whatever benefit, will never see this unless works like this one are written and said. It’s a love of familiarity and sharing and respect, of difference and similarity. It’s the genuine empathy, compassion, respect, admiration of horses that make this a creative, artistic and moral triumph.

It’s also a very clever book, and it needs to be, to articulate the all-too-often unspoken reality of human usage of horses. It’s clever in its language-usage, its pinpoint allusions that make us reflect on the language we use around all non-human life, and about what our art actually means when it comes to the living world. It uses rhetoric to upset our/the persona’s familiarities and sureties, to contest our safe positions, such as in the poem ‘You know’, the brilliant and distressing conceit of Romeo and Juliet and the fate of the horse, Romeo, and the failure to appreciate that language is non-human as well; all this emanates from this collection in ways that will, I hope, change the way we talk about human-animal interactions in general, and, indeed, human-human interactions. Justice can be done, and achieved.

And, as I launch this book, I want to say how ably served the work is by Dennis Haskell’s astute and beautifully ‘condensed’ introduction — a piece of poetry in itself. One great poet introducing the first full-length book of another, who will also bring a change to how we discuss and perceive what language can do.

          John Kinsella