Poetry. 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.
Jenny Drai’s THE NEW SORROW IS LESS THAN THE OLD SORROW is magic. Here the sources of the self (the selves) and the sources of love (loves) open and sing and challenge themselves. This poet renews rituals, this poet renews language.–Joseph Lease
Jenny Drai’s work asks that the reader ‘throw water against your heart as if that dragnet of emotions were a cliff. then master it.’ Reading these poems is the experience of puzzling with, even throwing oneself against, glass. Each shard is ripe with danger, and yet a whole picture will emerge, deftly and with booming imagination, if you choose to engage with the elements of this language. What I love most about Jenny Drai’s work is her faster-than-light, almost synesthetic switches. Poems that seem to be telling a love story are in fact heralding in a new color of visible light. And, of course, this teaches us what love really is.–Emily Kendal Frey
Jenny Drai’s THE NEW SORROW IS LESS THAN THE OLD SORROW is one of those vibrating works that somehow find electrical current to the light bulbs in your memory that have long lost their incandescence. The warmth from those burning pears can warm the dark forgotten corners of your past, but they can also bathe old haunts with cold remembrances. They can even startle you and make you laugh out loud at your own surprise. I’ve never read a book of poetry that has so closely resonated with me, and I’ve never been more convinced that there is a Werther and an old Goethe in us all.–Jack Morgan
