Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Cosmic Sadness

Cosmic Sadness

Skoulding, Zoë
Portante, Jean

Paperback

General Poetry

Publisher Price: $21.99

ISBN10: 1917617852
ISBN13: 9781917617857
Publisher: Broken Sleep Books
Published: Jun 30 2026
Pages: 200
Weight: 0.45
Height: 0.46 Width: 5.00 Depth: 8.00
Language: English

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.

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