Once at a reading, Will Alexander mentioned the physical stress of being a poet, of how the work was hard on the body. Indeed, it takes extraordinary energy to write poetry as Alexander does. He travels immensely within his work, drawing on centuries of knowledge that has been deliberately obscured by a dominant Western system; simultaneously, he imagines ways of being that lie beyond the calculating structures of capitalism and colonialism, which rely heavily on so-called objective measurement and surveyance. As Felwine Sarr writes in Afrotopia, “One of the principal errors of the West comes from what we could call its quantophrenic biases: the obsession to count everything, to evaluate, to quantify, and to place everything into equations.”