This essay ruminates on the interstices between politics, critical theory, and experimental writing which structure much of my own writing, and my engagement with Aboriginal and settler poets in the ambit of an unethically constituted nation state.

According to the British poet Keston Sutherland, radical thought begins with two linked questions—what size is the human subject, and what size is its world. This is a helpful starting point. Any discussion of revolutionary thinking—whether political or aesthetic—must begin by addressing the question of our capacity to affect change in the world, and the scale of the world we intend to change. Yet, we immediately encounter a problem: by drawing on existing understandings of concepts like self and world, we predict and restrict the answers that become possible. Marx identified this paradox pithily: