John Kinsella, who has made a name for himself in Australia and abroad as poet and critic/commentator, has published an extended prose sequence which his publishers describe as a novel, called Genre. It’s dedicated to Derrida, as well as Kinsella’s partner, Tracy Ryan; and it begins with quotes from Defoe (on the plague) and Dennis Hopper (on drugs). Genre reads like a kind of journal/essay with meditations on ideas of seeing, on poetry, and addiction, intercut with several narratives. ‘In the Theatre of the Imagination, all but one of the eight stages are occupied ... The Renaissance Man is writing an essay on an exhibition and thinking about his latest books on aesthetics.’ The narrator’s essay is called ‘A Public Viewing of Private Spaces’. The writing, shifting sometimes abruptly in mid-sentence, sometimes seamlessly from the journal or essay to other narratives, slides along in a smoke of speed (both kinds). Upstairs in Genre apartments, it’s a display of drugs, sex, and intellect. The student is reading Descartes, and writing a science fiction novel; the ‘girls’ are snorting speed – or is it ecstasy, acid, or strychnine; ‘the addict’ is reading a cult drug novella, too stoned to fill out his dole form, and his girlfriend has had her child taken away by the Department, and painted the walls vermilion.