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.

The rhetoric of the Anglo-American Protestant work ethos leaking into fascism as a support for extractive profiteering is condensed through the passive-aggressive voice of stoner disillusionment.

“When you see someone, a black guy, did I need to say it, getting punched in the chest by a cop with the full weight of his fist and his impunity, then being dragged away by another who kicks him to a pulp... you realise that all you’ve been able to write in your gilded youth is pure crap,” the protagonist observes.

The translation by Sophie Lewis adds her own formidable gifts to the intelligence of the original to give the reader a new genre —  the tiny poetic ooze of nonconformist thought that is possible out of the belly of the beast.

The book is a labour of love for Les Fugitives, a small London-based publisher  which punches above its weight in bringing French contemporary writing to Britain.

Funny-poetic, scary and smart, Poetics of Work is ultimately appalling in its implications.

Published by Les Fugitives, £9.99.