In Which I Am Assured: A Review of Leon Pradeau's "This Is It"
When I first decided to review Pradeau's book after my second read-through of it, I was quite invested in frontloading my review with a stark declaration that the thesis-quote ending most poems "This is it" actually plays no part in my understanding of it, and that I'll be purely bypassing it as a simple restraint. But I've always been utterly unable (and frankly profoundly unwilling!) to distance a review from my purely subjective experience of reading it, so now it is 4:05 am, Sunday April 13th and I'm beginning a review of Leon Pradeau's "This is it" from my moonlit balcony because I've spent the last ten hours questioning my own life with the exactly worded question "Is this it?". After wallowing in the discomforts of insomnia, I suddenly EUREKA'd awake to write that Pradeau's work may be the key to burst through this misery; or to perhaps conceptualize a tender compromise.
I don't know Leon Pradeau. But as soon as I met him in person at, roughly 3.5 hours before purchasing a signed copy of This is it, I found joy central to his life experience. In 5 minutes of shaking hands, taking selfies, receiving hat recommendations and exchanging instagrams at AWP25, I found in him a blazing furnace of curiosity and kinship. If i'm honest, if it wasn't for his personality, I wouldn't have picked up his book by purely browsing the antiphony press table. This is it, as a book object, makes so little effort to sell itself for what it is. the author name doesn't appear on the cover, there is no information on what appears within, and, as much as I'd love to revel in Pradeau's enthusiasm for geese, the cover of navy blue and geese cutouts takes one's mind to many places. BUT Pradeau sits behind the table with a goose t-shirt and his enthusiasm about geese makes the cover make sense in tandem.
If you bare with me I'll slowly get into what made this book click with me like nothing else this year. And why its dog-eared to a useless degree, since, in the end, what is the point of dog-earing almost 55 pages of a 69 page manuscript? I began the book while I had a gofundme active. I was job searching. I had just declared bankruptcy a few months ago. My father was battling stage 4 cancer. As I began to do my taxes I realized that my annual income had officially dropped the lowest in 15 years, even lower than my first ever job, working part time as a teenager. I've become a zombie, hazily walking cafe to cafe, reading and writing with the specifically worded mental knot of: "SURELY THIS CANT BE IT?"
That's all until as spring begins, Pradeau's book blossoms into my life as a cabinet of curiosities. His joy of discovery bursts on every page. His emotional experiences of contemporary US stay within a mode of linguistic play. Poems have similar hooks of "I made it to..." or "here is", all to end with the "this is it" that I initially disregarded as a topic to be discussed. His words queer themselves in their mirror ventriloquy: the self reference of language mirrors the self-acquaintance of queerness. The book is clear, emotionally generous, linguistically playful and mentally present. This is it was there for me in a week where no one else could be.
Here I'd like to acknowledge my lack of academic knowledge. I have never "studied" poetry or poetics outside an organic hunger for it. This is not going to be a review connecting Pradeau to what has come before him. I'm tempted to make comments connecting the French text to the "Frenchness" of linguistic ingenuity resounding in alienated Anglophonics. I'll leave those as ideas here to ferment. I'm not interested in This is it as a hyphenated object of literatures. I'm here to explore Pradeau as an individual instance within a borderless poetics that interlingual thinking can provide.
One of my favorite lines: "Down where your smell is june at night" appears in Pradeau's poem dedicated to Alice Notley's "At Night The States", recalling Notley's lines: "It smells like June in this night/ so sweet like air." is written with such delightful state of play, only a few lines before we read "you can diphtongue with me, no southern speak".
I'm aware here, that bringing a bit TOO MUCH attention to such state of play can perhaps create its own problems. So I'll address a few of those problems before they are projected for me after this writing becomes a matter of one-sided discussion:
As I write the paragraphs above, the dominant, screaming question may become: "Isn't attributing the quality and ease of linguistic exploration to interlingual experience perhaps undermining Pradeau's command of the English language?"
My assertions have their disadvantages. What i'm simply asserting here, is, that as a Francophone, Pradeau brings more of English to English, since English is made up of its Frenchness. BUT, i'm not asserting that what Pradeau brings out of English, IS the French, imbedded within English. Pradeau's ease of interlingual thinking brings MORE English, out of English, the way Pierre Joris's Agglutinations of English in translations of Celan, bring MORE English out of English.
I'd like to address a second question that may arise. A reder of This is It may read the passages above and ask "I do see a certain sense of linguistic play, but why has this review centred "play" when This is It includes such a wide range of emotional, and intelligent writing?"
Here's where I want to talk about why This is It was there for me when my friends couldn't. "... parked and feeling shackled by desire" starts a poem with its ominous elliptical lead-in and calming lowercase. Pradeau arrives at each poem, observes and is observed in what I mentioned as the "Queering act" of his poetics. The generosity of This is It is therefore, that we arrive at every poem alongside its speaker. We are given food, cigarettes, we ride shotgun to the end of each curiosity where "This is It".
The Queering act of "This is It" begins to feed a self-fulfilling cycle of desire. Each poem, broken down into a prose-poem desiring machine, is fulfilled by its one and only condition: "This is It": to desire is enough to fulfill desire. Desire is a self-fulfilling machinery and its perpetuation is where the queering act creates its surplus pleasure.
Its now 1:52 am, Friday April 18. I no longer question IS THIS IT?. Leon Pradeau has assured me that it is.