Cosmic Sadness

Cosmic Sadness gathers five sequences in which Jean Portante's imagination expands to an interstellar scale, Zoë Skoulding's facing-page translation carrying the French of La Tristesse Cosmique into the English language without settling its restlessness. Migratory birds, departing trains, roses, and leaking cosmic plumbing recur as a vocabulary of movement between north and south, between the human and a universe that exceeds it. Grief here is dispersed rather than confessional, pressed by the loss of Italian parents and the fracturing of an earthquake-struck city whose propped-up streets become a method, syntax continually jolted out of true. Punctuation follows the run of images rather than the logic of sentences, drawing the book's preoccupations with language, etymology, and migration into a wider literary cosmos and reordering its world at every scale, so that rupture reads as transformation rather than finality.