'In her review of John Ashbery’s translation of Illuminations in The New York Times, Lydia Davis reminds us that: “When Rimbaud’s mother asked of A Season in Hell, ‘What does it mean?’ — a question still asked of Rimbaud’s poetry, and of Ashbery’s, too — Rimbaud would say only, ‘It means what it says, literally and in every sense’.” ' (Introduction)

'The above passage is striking not only for the embodied, epidermal associations of Indigeneity (‘sun-tanned’), but also for the concordance of Noonuccal’s ‘double existence’ with transnational discourses of Blackness that come before and after her. One reads in this passage a similarity to both W.E.B. Du Bois’ ‘double consciousness’ and a popular contemporary iteration expressed in the phrase ‘walking in two worlds’. ' (Introduction)

'Status changes depending on our choice of and performance in language games as they exist dialectically. This is not merely to highlight the performativity of a proposition but to say language’s materiality, and activity, is paradoxically a real and ideal symptom and structure. If I say ‘I’m white’ the meaning of that depends on context as will the response.' (Introduction)

'That poetry is implicated with politics is incontrovertible.  As Theodore Adorno writes ‘art exists in the real world and has a function in it, and the two are connected by a large number of mediating links.’   Those mediating links however, the things that connect each to the other, are harder to grapple with. What does the daily life of a protest poet look like compared to a conservative one when both work in a modern university? What poetry does the politician read?' (Introduction)