Some Words Suicidal

Poetry is the record of hidden things in commerce with one another, and only that mystery allows us to live. Stella Vinitchi Radulescu's poetry is an alchemy, a magic of restraint and exposure, revealing the machinations of our invisible feelings, motives, appetites and fears. That she is a master of her condensary goes without saying, for this is a consummate language shaped with remarkable skill, and the voyages that these poems take are brilliant excursions into our inner lives, secret things pushed into the subconscious, broken promises and whispered asides. I have long admired Radulescu's bilingual ability to bend sentences to her will and those constructions are filled with a cross-cultural understanding that is consistently transcendent, that builds bridges into the landscapes of our shared interior lives. -Keith Flynn, author of Colony Collapse Disorder Some Words Suicidal, Stella Radulescu's newest poetry collection, is all at once experientially effusive and parsimonious, and is bravely so, both on and off the page. The meditative remittance of these works reminds us just how language means. Radulescu is not afraid to insist her readers subsist on the unnamable, in the spaces between ideas. The poems here thread rather purposefully through dimensions, all the while rending artifice's will without the prudence of architecture, where "words are bees stars ants roaming / on the page / beyond understanding" into truth. Radulescu takes nothing and everything for granted, and at her behest, every word, every line, every stanza and poem reminds us we should too. And, yes, every time, with absolute devotion. -Ralph Pennel