Some days ago, because I was on top of all my deadlines and felt like beginning on a new book — Fred Moten's Black and Blur, part one of his trilogy, consent not to be a single being, I went to a cafe a stone's throw away from where I live, ordered a coffee and a chocolate croissant and settled into my seat. I had watched a video of Moten reading his poems at a TS Eliot memorial reading, and had heard him speak profoundly about Blackness, and I was keen to enter his philosophical universe. I didn't expect to feel so thrown off, though.

Moten writes elegantly, infusing his sentences, always, with a touch of vulnerability usually lacking in most forms of philosophical treatise. As a practising poet, sometimes a phrase really blazes through your field of vision. Could I offer a summary of his preface? Possibly not.