Killing Time (extract from work in progress with john kinsella, per se)

Abstract

This essay is a fictocritical meditation upon the contemporary transformation of temporal experience as we find ourselves embarked upon an accelerating process of climate change and species extinction, including possibly that of the human species. The essay offers an extended reading of a recent villanelle published in John Kinsella’s Book of Villanelles (Arc, 2020) that in turn responds to a controversial project by the Adani mining consortium to begin extracting coal over a large swathe of Wangan and Jagalingou country in the Central Queensland Galilee Basin. The essay is an extract from a collaborative work in progress by John Kinsella and myself, Per Se: On the Imperatives of Place II, that will appear in early 2021 with Narr, building upon ˈtεmp(ə)rərɪnəs: On the Imperatives of Place (Narr, 2018).