Cosmic Sadness - by Jean Portante & Zoë Skoulding (Paperback)

About the Book

Cosmic Sadness gathers 5 sequences in which Jean Portante's imagination expands to an interstellar scale, Zoë Skoulding's facing-page translation carrying the French into the English language without settling its restlessness

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

Jean Portante stands among the most singular voices in contemporary poetry. These poems are alive to difference, breaking open the idea of a stable "I," finding selfhood not in roots but in restlessness, in the fertile space of otherness. Here, identity isn't something fixed or inherited; it wanders and listens, continually remade beyond the limits of nation or language. For Portante, how a poem speaks matters as much as what it says. His language resists transparency - it refuses to simply mirror reality - and instead pulses with striking, unexpected images that unsettle and reimagine the world. Drawing on the spirit of the avant-garde, his style is bold, exploratory, and unafraid to push past tradition. What emerges is a poetry deeply aware of itself as material, a poetry charged with the power to transform both language and perception.

- Víctor Rodríguez Núñez