Language, in Ernesto Priego's poem, is less a tool than a room the speaker cannot find a seat in. The opening question, "in what language / am I supposed / to express this / passage?", sounds practical, but "passage" does double duty: it is a crossing from one country to another, and a stretch of life that needs describing. The details that follow (a stamped visa, strangers asking each other where they come from) suggest a speaker living among migrants. Nobody in the poem gets a satisfying answer. The real subject is that talking about displacement is already tangled up in the displacement.
The most inventive move is grammatical. The speaker notices that we use lowercase letters "except of course / for the first person," and wonders if this is dread of "the grand eloquence of / conquerors and pirates." The poem half-obeys its own observation: most sentences begin in lowercase, and only "I" stands tall. The capitals that do appear are telling. "Book of English As a Foreign Language" and "Coming From Originally" are capitalised like course titles, as though a casual phrase had been pinned down as a lesson. The poem's point is that no textbook teaches what that phrase really means, or "the tactful fear of offending" that comes with using it. A quiet detail the poem leaves to the reader is that English capitalises "I" while Spanish does not capitalise "yo."
The refrain "what is the pre-position / needed for this question?" frames everything. The hyphen splits the word so that "position" shows through: where do you stand before you speak? Prepositions are also the small words that say where things come from and what they go with, and the poem's questions are built on them. "De dónde eres" is the Spanish twin of "where are you from," and the final "¿con qué lengua puedo hacer / estas preguntas?" turns on "con," "with." The word "lengua" means both tongue and language, so the question has a body in it. That echoes the earlier image of a "visa stamped / on green paper skin," where bureaucracy seeps into flesh.
The imagery moves between warm and cold. Those who left "forever" talk about the smells of kitchens and grandmothers' skies "bluer" and gardens "greener," with a wry "of course" suggesting nostalgia always improves the colours. Then comes "they (we?)", a parenthesis that shows the speaker slipping from observer to member of the group. The community is not romanticised: "being all together does not mean / we are equal, united, sympathetic." Instead the speaker reaches for physics. People "rub against each other like / shaken atoms, excited and displaced," and the single-line stanza "we are concerned with explosions" lands like a warning. Calling the city a "laboratory of human interaction" puts a cool, scientific lens on something messy and emotional. The image of the "bleeding heart" that must "remember to forget" ends the poem's imagery on a paradox.
Formally, this is free verse with no rhyme, and the pull comes from structure and repetition. Most stanzas have five short lines, and many lines end on small grammatical words ("the," "of," "if we," "nor the"). The poem keeps leaning on the very type of word it is questioning. "no longer know" spills across a stanza break, so the sentence stumbles as it describes not knowing. The shorter stanzas interrupt the pattern: the parenthetical couplet, the lone line about explosions, and the Spanish couplet near the end. The title word "Reprise" promises a return, and the ending delivers it by repeating the question about the preposition. The poem circles back instead of closing.
That refusal to resolve is what makes the poem worth reading. It treats migration as a problem of grammar and voice as well as geography, and it shows that even choices like capital letters or prepositions can carry feeling. It does not offer a tidy picture of a multicultural city or a comforting answer about home. It leaves the reader inside the question, switching languages without ever feeling fully placed in either.