Coombes takes Poetics of Relation as the hinge of Glissant's career and the starting point of this study, arguing that the 1990 book marks a genuine break with the earlier theoretical writing, and that everything Glissant produced afterwards elaborates rather than departs from the paradigm it set.

Much of the work is exposition. Coombes lays out the interlocking neologisms, Relation and errantry among them, and the rhizomatic conception of identity borrowed from Deleuze and Guattari, explaining why Glissant refuses to derive identity from a single root. That refusal is grounded in the francophone Caribbean's history of forced migration, colonial rule and what Glissant saw as continued subordination. The concepts are presented as a loose system their author declined to systematize, and which he expected readers to assemble for themselves.

Coombes also reads Glissant against the market-driven globalization of the neoliberal decades, and defends him in later chapters from radical critics who find his thought politically useless.