SET against the backdrop of rising nationalism and police brutality in France, this little firecracker of a book from Noemi Lefebvre is part discourse, part philosophical meditation and Beckettian stream of consciousness.

It’s set somewhere in Lyon, where an unnamed poet spliffs their tortured way through the state of emergency following the 2015 terrorist attacks.

Through an ongoing inner dialogue with a superego father, who was “sitting in his study in the right side of my brain, he was leafing through 4x4 Magazine,” the narrator filters cogent questions of selfhood from within the machinery of capitalism in what’s an elegant little genre-buster riffing on philosophies of language, being and poetry in short, crackling fragments.