Flirting is easier, it can seem, in a second language. With the mechanical mastery of your native tongue no longer taking over the moment you, half-aware, simply open your mouth to speak, the words take on a fresh integrity as they pass through your efforts, rebecoming something closer to themselves, or mutating into something private and strange.
Léon Pradeau’s “This is It” (Antiphony Press, 2025) is an odd, wide-eyed love letter that dramatizes this kind of wrestling with language—note the quotation marks in the title. It’s a book of simulated Americana, with the country’s natural, artificial, and linguistic landscapes stirred together in a poetic cement mixer that savors the uneven surfaces it spits out, emphasizing irregularities like pebbles sticking out from the sidewalk. One poem has the poet “writing the roman à clef of american fatigue,” but weariness is not obvious in Pradeau’s book, which, through its kaleidoscopic language play, works up a particular herky-jerky energy.
Like his French-language debut, vaisseau instantané / instant shipping (éditions les murmurations, 2024), in which we seem to accompany a package expedited from container to warehouse to cargo ship to you, “This is It” is a high-speed voyage—the poet pinballs from lake to supermarket to hospital to kitchen to bathtub to train tracks in the first six poems before going back to a lake and continuing the picaresque journey, making detours for refreshments, meditations on romance, and multiple car crashes. The rhythms are staccato and looping, the format largely fixed in 18-line rectangular blocks of prose, the language jackknifed at the crossroads of babbling speech and textural precision:
We left Costco as a lake of duplicate and love in bulk: our membership is in the trunk. We are so stacked & heartful is dizzy. Even my glasses blur and various roads align and signs, I squint. But swerve & hit your post whose faulty reflection when tearing the mirror: oops, we start spinning, oh crash this such, and this is it.
Lines of thought change course and collide, with grammatical dead ends providing obstacles—an interrupting colon leaves a phrase in the last sentence hanging—or becoming expressive in themselves: the crunch and empty confusion of “oh crash this such.”
Obstacles are key in “This is It,” whether in the barriers the poet always seems to be running into or vaulting over or in the mantra-like iterations of the title in most of the book’s 40 poems, sounding less definitive with each repetition. Typically, a scene or situation for each vignette is made more or less clear at the start, but what follows is hazy, the tone hesitant, as refracted language obstructs our view beyond a dilated immediate environment, as in the aftermath of another car crash:
Everywhere is oil from the car into a river turn, flows between my toes. Dark lubricant brown is liquid. Runs under leg, warm very sigh. Why naked now, skin darker spoon on thigh is marmalade, this polluted freeing canned or cathartic so hard, here it is.
Or a thicket of vocabulary can become its own environment, as in an erotic poem that forgoes sensuality:
Trying stability is inside on, for us to stand and finally could say: yes, here you go, here’s the spot. Oh just would be so, could. Whereas, your company such parallels of misaligning. Whereas, our mergers incomplete as dialed. Vying for head where ours wander off, speeding on for a lane to keep, or muster on acquire. I look at hands like a vector, if you could, onto me. Trying for sentences afoot. Step in this spit is me & gawp. I’ll become what this means, to you.
This combination of academic meticulousness (whereas, misaligning, vying, vector), impersonal scraps of business-ese (mergers, incomplete as dialed, acquire), and sensory monosyllables (step, spit, gawp), obscured/brought to life by missing words and garbled grammar, is a good sample of the book’s porous, collagey style.
A lot of new poetry seems dogged by an anxiety about its contemporaneity, with doubts about dealing with 21st-century language taking the form of a scrubbed-clean “timelessness” or a cleverer-than-thou sarcasm that sees writers condescending to language trends while feeding off their vitality. “This is It” is one way to be contemporary and avoid both traps. Its New World wonder is more halting curiosity than surging sublimity; its cultural commentary more obstacle course than satirical revelation. The poems are full of things, observing a frenzy of consumption but at an arm’s length, with the pace slowed by syntax slippage and typographic speed bumps. Is the intersection of Gertrude Stein and Liquid Death ad copy an aesthetic justice or an outrage? No matter: Pradeau’s comic, reflective voice is an equalizer, in which getting teargassed is as curious an experience as eating ice cream in the tub, and “whereas” can become conversational scotch tape while a word like “cool” loses its ubiquitous ease.
In the end, the poet is revealed to be not so much a born adventurer as a sort of magpie stuck in flight while daydreaming of its nest, gathering heterogeneous materials to make a home in, and out of, its harsh surroundings:
I made it home. Yet needs clearing, perhaps, or a new game. I need to make it “cool” for us to be, for you to come back and say, oh neat! a nest. [...] Soft hands and elastic smell of fresh, oh like almond maybe with department of citrus, hint. Every name is a smell, and smell will call you home. Cushion the taste of a season in your shirt. “so sweet like air.” Will you have me in nest of us?
The new American debris is already old and might be here to stay. With “This is It,” Léon Pradeau makes the case for running your tongue across it.