Goodwin’s writing emanates from the social life of poetry, from a condition of entanglement before historically racially-specific forms of representation. Another word for this emanation is breath.

“aspects caught in the headspace we’re in is on the blacksociopoetics of breath, the dyscompositional topology of its runaway cadence, homonymic exchanges and idiomatic differentiation that make the work a body of work on the run/rhumb, on a line of constant bearing, curve, fugitive tilt, a beginning without origin, turning, slurring, folding, and spinning the content and context of its various places and occurrences into misrecognition, where the social life of poetry proliferates through the impure, formless, and felt remonstrance of breath as the emanation of friendship, musicality, love, air, displacement, earth, antisubjectivity, loxodromes, death, decay, preservation, and realness.” – James Goodwin