Cosmic Sadness

By Jean Portante and Zoë Skoulding

Cosmic Sadness gathers five sequences in which Jean Portante's imagination expands to an interstellar scale, Zo 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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1917617852
• ISBN13: 9781917617857
• Release Date: June 2026
• Publisher: Broken Sleep Books
• Length: 200 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.0" x 8.0"