SUPERLIQUID WATER by Cécile Mainardi

Pub date: April 16, 2026. ISBN 9798991148955. 74 pages. 5" x 8". Cover is printed on a Kelsey Excelsior Model O letterpress. Book is perfect bound.

The true structure of a water molecule is a bent, polar shape. Based on experimental and compositional studies by the poet Cécile Mainardi, Superliquid Water is a hustle of fen and foam. Like its eponymous substance, the syntax herein is slippery, pouring into and out of itself, so much so that “superliquid water starts running through the sentence before the sentence even begins.” Expertly translated by cj nizard and Léon Pradeau—the first book of Mainardi to appear in English—these prose poems fathom language as supersaturated and the tangible humid. “Scandalously gushing down the fountain’s basins in baroque offsets,” Pradeau and nizard's translation splashes around in a tide of contextual and linguistic possibility.

Superliquid Water by Cécile Mainardi is a striking fusion of lyricism and conceptual art, exploring the boundaries of language and perception through the invention of a mysterious substance—superliquid water. Through a series of highly imaginative prose poems, Mainardi plays with the fluidity of both language and reality, creating a world where the physical and linguistic merge. With wit and a deadpan scientific tone, she challenges our understanding of materiality, time, and the mind’s relationship to the world, offering a thought-provoking and innovative reading experience. All readers of Mainardi can thank cj nizard & Léon Pradeau for giving us this lively and expert translation. —Peter Gizzi

A madcap and mock materialist Mallarmé in a lab coat, Mainardi tries to explain what cannot be explained. What is superliquid water? An abstract substance, what sentences swim in (or vice versa) the flow of reading, prose in space. Superliquid water can revivify the dead, rhythmically rock us in bed, blow inspiration out of the water, buoy the poem and record the voice’s “emptied mystery.” It’s the reason poetry can never be measured, weighed, or quantified. But it also explains everything about what happens before, during, and after you write and read it. Pradeau and nizard’s translation is miraculous. There are non seams here. Superliquid Water's champagne pyramid is poured from the bottom up, yet still it made me tipsy. —Jennifer Moxley

In Isaiah 11.9 we find a vision of the world to come in which divine knowledge will fill the earth “as water covers the sea.” Is not the sea already water, we might ask, and so what does it mean to say that water covers it? This is an early example of “superliquid water,” a phenomenon of writing borne both upon the proposition of itself and the overflow which exceeds it. Finally now we have in our hands the authoritative book on this substance, Cécile Mainardi’s Superliquid Water, written “expressly for the swimming occasion of writing” where the text “flow(s) continuously into what it ceaselessly isn’t.” —Lewis Freedman

“In such delirious proportions,” with grace, wildness, and exacting method, Cécile Mainardi pours her water-language into the ephemeral vessel of poetry. It is an impossible science and a remarkable performance, at once dense and weightless, otherworldly yet lexically real. What a gift it is to have her Superliquid Water in this superb English translation. —Michael Nardone