The New Sorrow Is Less Than the Old Sorrow

A young Au Pair living in Germany reads Goethe’ s famous tragedy, The Sorrows of Young Werther, for the first time. Years later, she crafts an answer as she considers the storm of early love in her own life, the drudgery of work, and even Goethe’ s later response to his own text. In this exquisite cycle of prose poems, Jenny Drai’ s language twists around corners and bends at odd angles, delivering a voice at once deft and aching, sharp and hungry: “ passion-trigger-passion. someone, somewhere, worships in a grotto at a shrine to suicide. the pain of. the remittance of. love.” The New Sorrow Is Less Than the Old Sorrow navigates the sturm und drang of early love, loss, and distance, and the timeless perplexity of heartbreak.