A Cry in the Snow and Other Poems (Hardbound-2019)

Stella vinitchi radulescu’s poetry dwells in spaces of paradox, seeking out the words, metaphors and images that capture both the peaceful stillness of snow and the desperate cry of human experience. A cry in the snow and other poems often draws on these two fertile tropes: the beauty of nature and the power and limitations of language. A trilingual poet who has published in French, English and her native Romanian, radulescu seeks to harness the elemental aspects of human experience, working between language and the mysterious power of silence. Combining poems from two French-language collections, un cri dans LA neige (a cry in the snow) and a poetic prose sequence, journal aux yeux fermés (journal with closed eyes), this collection presents the distinctive and powerful French poems of Stella vinitchi radulescu to an English language readership for the first time. ‘Like seashells with light shining through, these poems by Stella vinitchi radulescu express the tough fragility of being; in his lucid translation, Luke hankins mirrors perfectly their deftness and their strength.’ hoyt Rogers, author and translator ‘her poems—metaphysical thought, molecules drowning in stars—are strong, mysterious, cryptic, surreal, ethereal, dangerous, bursting with authority, operating at a ghostly spiritual intuitive level...’ David Dodd Lee, poet and editor.

Luke Hankins (b. 1984) attended the Indiana University M.F.A. in Creative Writing program, where he held the Yusef Komunyakaa Fellowship in Poetry. His first collection of poems, Weak Devotions, was published by Wipf & Stock Publishers in 2011, and his second, Radiant Obstacles, is forthcoming in 2020. He is also the author of a collection of essays, The Work of Creation: Selected Prose (Wipf & Stock, 2016) and the editor of Poems of Devotion: An Anthology of Recent Poets (Wipf & Stock, 2012). A collection of his translations from the French of Stella Vinitchi Radulescu, A Cry in the Snow & Other Poems, was published in an international edition by Seagull Books in 2019.

Hankins is the founder and editor of Orison Books (www.orisonbooks.com), a non-profit literary press focused on the life of the spirit from a broad and inclusive range of perspectives. He also serves as Senior Editor at Asheville Poetry Review and as a staff book reviewer at Southern Humanities Review. His poems, essays, and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous publications, including 32 Poems, American Literary Review, The Collagist, Image, Linebreak, New England Review, Pleiades, Poetry International, World Literature Today, and The Writer's Chronicle, as well as on the American Public Media radio program "On Being."