I Scrape the Window of Nothingness: New & Selected Poems is a selection from Stella Vinitchi Radulescu's English-language work published over several decades, along with a substantial collection of unpublished work. Melding the mystical, surrealist, and modernist traditions, Radulescu's work is unique in American poetry. Words become tactile objects in Radulescu's hands, and her poems enable us to experience language as if for the first time. As one reads these poems, gleaming fragments of experience accrue and begin to cohere in unanticipated ways, forming a monument to the mystery of existence.

Stella Vinitchi Radulescu was born in Romania and left the country permanently in 1983, at the height of the communist regime. She holds a Ph.D. in French Language & Literature and has taught French at Loyola University and Northwestern University. Writing poetry in three languages, she has published numerous books in the United States, France, and Romania. Radulescu's French books have received several awards, including the Grand Prix de Poésie Henri-Noël Villard and the Prix Amélie Murat.

''Stella Vinitchi Radulescu's poems are rich in connotations, metaphysically profound in some great unlocatable fashion. Surreal, ethereal, some of the poems enact ghostly things, and a very powerful world view glitters and solidifies…. 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, author of The Nervous Filaments

''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 'at the edge of spoken time,' a vision 'wildly sad, diffused, beautiful, a tactile absence.' In this poetry of passionate paradox, embodied thought becomes the solid clarity through which what we can't see is glimpsed.'' -- Eleanor Wilner, MacArthur Fellow and author of Tourist in Hell

''Remarkable for their condensed form, Radulescu's poems privilege image over narrative, unpredictability over certainty, and pensive contemplation over exhilaration. Hermetic and shrouded from easy interpretations, the poems in this collection give voice, speech, and language stunning corporeality.'' -- Roxana L. Cazan, The Chattahoochee Review

''Stella Vinitchi Radulescu's poetry irradiates, like a magnetic field charged with mysteries, the movements and the rituals of her bright vision. One of the strongest characteristics of her poems consists in the unabridged relationship she establishes with words, a pact that sends us to their origins. The poet dares to carry the shadow of her own loneliness, keeping pace with that of her words, up to the line of a horizon where sky and earth, life and death merge.''-- Alexandru Lungu, editor of Zarathustra and Argo