Traveling With the Ghosts
poems by Stella Vinitchi Radulescu
Read a poem from Traveling With the Ghosts at Poetry Daily here!
Orison Books
paper / 108 pp. / $16.00
ISBN: 978-1-949039-25-2
Distributed to the trade by Itasca Books
1-800-901-3480 / orders@itascabooks.com
Publication Date: December 31, 2021
ABOUT THE BOOK
In her latest collection of English-language poems, trilingual poet Stella Vinitchi Radulescu continues to explore the capabilities and limits of language itself as the nexus where thought and physicality meet. Gathering fragments of idea and image from a vast constellation of influences, Radulescu's nimble, ever-surprising poems weave a tapestry that embodies what it feels like to be both intensely alive and knowingly transient.
PRAISE FOR RADULESCU'S WORK
“The impressionistic latest from Radulescu [Traveling With the Ghosts] weaves fragmentary poems that explore themes of time, memory, writing, and death. […] These meditative, metaphysical poems are rewardingly dense with surprising turns and images.”
—Publishers Weekly
“This timely collection [...] is an exploration of that metaphysical place where language and thought meet. This is not a book that instructs, it is one that feels, and it feels deeply.”
—Ligeia Magazine
“[Radulescu] searches for a sentence that would resurrect lost species, crickets and frogs, but has learned that 'the only way to Paradise / is not to ask.' Not to use words as a map. Still, she prays, 'let me clean the air / with a vowel / or two' and constructs her new sentence 'void by void,' beginning with emptiness as we all do every time we sit down with a blank page.”
—RHINO
“Radulescu’s poems are rich in connotations, metaphysically profound in some great unlocatable fashion. […] It’s a dark poetry shining with the ecstasy of the imagination let loose, a triumph of being, a war against banality.”
—David Dodd Lee
“Daunting to even try to put into a few words a poetry that is sui generis, whose moving language of images, displaced from any single set of cultural signs, seems the distillation of a thousand occasions, a legion of losses—a universal language.... In this poetry of passionate paradox, embodied thought becomes the solid clarity through which what we can’t see is glimpsed.”
—Eleanor Wilner
“Radulescu's poetry is an alchemy, a magic of restraint and exposure, revealing the machinations of our invisible feelings, motives, appetites, and fears.”
—Keith Flynn
“Many native English speaking poets don’t have such a supple and sensitive ear to the music of our language.”
—Annie Finch
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Stella Vinitchi Radulescu was born in Romania. She left the country in 1983, at the height of the communist regime. She holds a PhD in French Language & Literature, and she was a professor of French at Loyola University and Northwestern University for many years. The author of numerous poetry collections published in the United States, France, Belgium, and Romania, Radulescu writes in three languages, though she does not translate any of her work between languages. In 2019, a volume of Luke Hankins's English-language translations of her French poetry, A Cry in the Snow & Other Poems, was published by Seagull Books. Orison Books released a collection of Radulescu’s English-language work, I Scrape the Window of Nothingness: New & Selected Poems, in 2015.