What is most striking about these sorrows is not their obscurity but rather their specificity. Koenig has tapped the well of human experience and amassed a sizable collection of, what are usually, deeply personal moments. For each of these, he has assigned a name, generally a portmanteau of words from an assortment of languages, and composed a description of the feeling that is utterly dripping with sorrow and nostalgia and… there’s probably a word for it in here somewhere…
Inventing words is nothing new, but a collection of this magnitude is a sizable project. This is clearly a labor of love, and the afterword is a touching testament to this love and this opus it has birthed. This is a collection best tasted sparingly, over a long time. There is a consistent weight to the words (they are sorrows after all) and read cover-to-cover, this volume can be exhausting in its repetitiveness. I was, at first, a little confused by the whole endeavor. There are many words in many languages for specific moments and feelings. Why not simply collect and share those? Why invent new ones? To which there is an obvious answer, “Why not? Words are beautiful.”. This is not linguistics, nor cultural anthropology. It is truly a poem about everything… well, some things at least.