UnHistory

After completing four collections of dialogue in poems, Kwame Dawes in Nebraska (via Ghana and Jamaica) and John Kinsella in Western Australia, have produced a monumental fifth volume in four movements: unHistory.unHistory is an essential record of our times by two world-leading poets, acutely sensitive to the bracing global turmoil of the last five years. It is an exploration of history’s undertones, its personal, familial, and institutional resonances and of the relationship between public events and the literary imagination. It is at the same time an elegant enactment of friendship and memory. As in previous volumes, the marvel is poetry that has all the fluidity of spontaneous response, and the shapeliness and finesse of the most deeply considered work written by two prolific and influential writers at the height of their powers as poets.

John Kinsella's many books of poetry include Jam Tree Gully (WW Norton) and Drowning in Wheat (Picador). Widely published, he has collaborated with many artists, composers, writers and poets. He is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, and Professor of Literature and Sustainability at Curtin University. Kwame Dawes is the author of twenty-two books of poetry and numerous other books of fiction, criticism, and essays. He is Glenna Luschei Editor-in-Chief of Prairie Schooner and George W. Holmes University Professor at the University of Nebraska. Dawes is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. His awards include an Emmy, the Felix Dennis (Forward) Prize for Poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the PEN/Nora Magid Award for Magazine Editing, and the Windham Campbell Prize for poetry.