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.
 
PRAISE for Cosmic Sadness:
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
 
ABOUT Jean Portante & Zoë Skoulding:
Jean Portante was born in Differdange (Luxembourg) in 1950, is of Italian origin, and lives in Paris. He has written over fifty books: novels, stories, plays, essays, translations and poetry. His work has received many prizes, including the prestigious Mallarmé Poetry Award in 2003 for his poetry collection L’Étrange langue in France, and in Luxembourg, the National Literature Award for his life’s work. He is published in more than twenty countries and has worked as a translator for over thirty years.
 
Zoë Skoulding is a poet whose work encompasses literary criticism, performance and translation. Her poems have been translated into over twenty languages and presented at numerous international poetry festivals. She has received several awards, including the Wales Book of the Year Poetry Award in 2020 for Footnotes to Water and the Cholmondeley Award in 2018 for her entire body of work. She lives in north Wales, where she is Professor of Poetry and Creative Writing at Bangor University.