My novel, A Beggar’s Garden, and its accompanying exegesis, ‘Reading in A Beggar’s Garden: being without shadow’ are offered as sites of confluence where the political, the personal, the poetic and the polemic meet, blend, separate, reform and reconfigure. I hope the work rings with the ‘sociological poetics’ described by Paul Dawson – a poetics which recognises the ‘aesthetic or craft-based decisions of a writer are always the result … of ideological or political choice: the choice to employ social languages and the ideologies they embody … the choice to position a literary work in these languages, as an active intervention in the ideological work they perform’ (Dawson 2005: 211, emphasis in original). Critically and creatively I am telling stories that resonate in a contemporary register and with the tone and timbre of the language of affect which has here been derived from what Mark Davis describes as ‘the logic of affect since … this is the logic of contemporary politics and the public sphere’ (Davis 2007: 26-27). I use language as critique and explore through creative, critical and political idioms the intersections where these languages collide to produce the vernacular that positions, forms and informs subjectivity. The images, ideas, historiography and politics embedded in everyday languages are too often violent and proscriptive. I appropriate the violent tendencies laced through everyday languages and use them towards their opposite effect, towards compassion, belonging and dignity for the outcasts, outsiders and outriders of the community.