Abstract
In the nearly 800 pages that comprise the three volumes of his Graphology Poems 1995–2015 (Five Islands P, 2016), John Kinsella demonstrates an exemplary moral anger registering iterations of colonial “omni-speak” as unethical (1: 93). This paper reads Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer (Stanford UP, 1998) by way of apprehending the rhetorical substrata underpinning discourses of Australia as not just determining a sovereign colonial space; in a place where “history is absurdity […] history is overlay” (Graphology Poems 1: 158), Kinsella shows how indigenous and non-colonial others are consistently cast as extra-juridical and merely sub-human. These Graphology Poems not only anathemise and hex historical falsehoods of nation: Kinsella dares sound out the bullshit, and his iconoclastic language games refuse outright to acquiesce to the epistemically violent nullifications of antipodean identity.
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