I made it to a stop on tracks, writing the roman à clef of
american fatigue. In the novel are empty billboards, or
rusted midwest fence. Trains are slower than the past.
And like today for instance was man or woman say, lover
and lover, here it is, horse rode in the forest, it was autumn
and yellow leaves, the wind and words they said and red
sun closed their eyelids. How just a waning light over
pollute alleys can create this a lull. Identities getting
confused and start to scream, slipping through stream
up sets of systemic error. Staying with falls afloat, rather
dreamless of late, but when I do, “this” is what it is.
“This is it” means we’ve arrived somewhere. But it also means we’re stuck with it. Léon Pradeau’s prose poems move between arriving and accepting. “This is it” is a book about americana; curious, clueless, idealizing, ironic; from Walgreens to body shops, from Lake Michigan to the Columbia River, and from geese to demolition derbies. The book also indirectly responds to James Broughton’s 1971 film of the same title, where a child chases a ball through suburban streets while a voiceover repeats a rhyme: “this is it and I am it and you are it…” After Broughton, “This is it” wonders what “a small miracle of the ordinary” might look like.
Advance Praise for "This is it."
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 of dense and lovely and textured vignettes 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.
—Lindsay Turner
“This is it” is at turns a cheeky declaration, an uncertain whisper, a plaint, a sneak peek at love and play and magic. Here’s an inquisitive soul at large in a foreign field where language is dense and abundant and pliable enough to accommodate two tongues. Léon Pradeau has written a filmic book of 37 vertical poems shot in cinema verité with two praise interludes to Alice Notley and Bernadette Mayer. These beautiful scenes are cast with effects from classical literature, modern poetry, a screaming gull meme, TV, a can of Liquid Death, and more. They stream by in their variegated instances that invite us to share in his delightful discovering. It is temporal. It is lasting. It is silly. It is sincere. Skillfully rendered. Enchanting. This is it.
—Ken Taylor
C’est qui qui parle ? C’est quoi ces oies ? Du Chicago ? Il fait quoi ce corps-garçon dans le corps du poème ? et sa prose ? corps de langue une laquelle étrangère ? cette peur et puis l’amour ? la quoi ? flouté de résident permanent ou ajustement de statut ? (en coulisse Bernadette Meyer et Alice Notley pouffent). Concentré de tomates ou plan américain, dans tous les cas, au rayon poétique le surgissement d’un corps étranger qui prend les risques de compter ! à vos marques, prêt, partez !
—Liliane Giraudon
“speaking of scenery, I’m soaked” says the language-consciousness of “This is it” — uncomfortably co-constituted with the US American landscape it finds itself in. This is a book finding language forms to hold both a “roman à clef of american fatigue” and the complex, difficult tenderness and material care involved in sustained love for another person: “we find us tending. It needs to be tending.” "This is it" (“not to sound foreign or anything, but?”) sends English through a warped mirror of French syntax and thought-order, the “moods of a French silence,” that make American-ness appear newly, weirdly, specifically; I love this book's multilayered and modulatory relationship to its questions, affects, and objects.
—Kai Ihns
Léon Pradeau is a poet, translator, and editor based in Chicago. He is the founding editor of Transat’, a journal of poetry in French and English. His publications include vaisseau instantané/instant shipping (Les murmurations, 2024) the chapbook snow of snow (Bottlecap, 2024). Recent poems and translations can be found in Denver Quarterly, FENCE, Antiphony (US), Mouche, Cockpit, Doc(k)s (FR), and elsewhere.