Some words about “This is it”

“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.”

—Nathan Kouri, for The Poetry Project. Read his review here.

“A romp, a love letter, a midwestern road trip, a lovers’ walk down to the lake, an afternoon out fishing, as American as a tarte aux pommes or a car crash in a nouvelle vague film or Roland Barthes’ Mythologies? “This is it” Léon Pradeau’s first full-length collection of poems in English, is it. Earthy and place-bound but also delightfully heady in its expansion of expected registers of speech, allusion, and imagery? This is it. A little book that’s somehow Lyn Hejinian’s My Life meets Alice Notley’s At Night the States meets something imported, something new, something sparkling and alive? This—you guessed it—is it.”

blurb by Lindsay Turner, author of Songs & Ballads and The Upstate.