I Scrape the Window of Nothingness: New &amp; 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Vinitchi Radulescu's English-language work published over several decades, along with a substantial collection of unpublished work.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.

I Scrape the Window of Nothingness: New & Selected Poems

Literature & Fiction

Radulescu, Stella Vinitchi

Poetry

Orison Books

Stella Vinitchi Radulescu

Requiem for Used Ignition Cap (The Orison Poetry Prize)

Winner of the 2016 Bob Bush Memorial Award for Best First Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters. Winner of the 2015 Orison Poetry Prize. Finalist for the 2015 National Poetry Series. Finalist for the 2015 Writers' League of Texas Book Award. Named One of the Best Poetry Books of Winter 2016 by Foreword Reviews. . . . Set in the drought-plagued landscape of Central Texas, Requiem for Used Ignition Cap is a collection of lyric poems that chronicle life in and around Llano, Texas (population 3,033). Catfish heads hang on clotheslines waiting for the ensuing apocalypse. Blue heelers call out from drainage ditches, searching for friendly hands to lick. Hell-fire preachers lament the drowning of a young Pentecostal boy caught in the river's floodgate. Brownlee's poems meditate on the inescapability of place. When they give an inch, they do so to take a yard--all the while earnestly making a case for the rural condition's place in contemporary American poetry. Praise for the collection: Devotion, whether in poetry or prayer, requires one to pay attention.From the very first poem of this collection to the last, J. Scott Brownlee does exactly that. Whether it is the landscapes of Texas,soldiers home from Iraq, or the awkward ways in which we relate to eachother, these poems pay close attention to details and transform them into something organic, whole, and incredibly moving. -C. DALE YOUNG, judge of the 2015 Orison Poetry Prize J. Scott Brownlee's Requiem for Used Ignition Cap pulses with imagery that grounds and levitates mind and body,crisscrossing some risky borderlands, but always in a zone of quotidian integrity. This collection, honed and shaped, is woven from ordinary lives and dreams, and each trope honors the earth we walk upon. There's a feeling in this collection--voices and rituals that spark the landscape. Brownlee juxtaposes mind and spirit, and there's nowhere these poems don't dare to go. -YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA The violence of men, the delicacy of their broken bodies, the religiosity of the town that raised them: all of these influence Requiem for Used Ignition Cap, which documents an America we rarely see. In J.Scott Brownlee's Llano, high school football heroes become PTS-affected war vets. The rural dead sing from the hollow flutes their bones leave in the dust. These are poems whose language begins with the body and the land. For Brownlee, the two are inseparable. -DORIANNE LAUX In his debut collection, J. Scott Brownlee writes a stunning ode to his rural Texas hometown and its fathers, brothers, and ghosts. Llano is a place where meth addicts score, wildflowers burn, hunters drink in their blinds, slain deer talk, soldiers return from duty with loaded guns,and the Wal-Mart sign glows brighter than Friday night's lights. Informs that barely contain their explosive contents, Brownlee's poems relate and interrogate what's expected of young White men growing up in the rural South. In doing so, they resist the erasure and nostalgia of some Southern literature and instead lay bare the benefits and violent trappings of small-town Christianity and masculinity. These poems are at once song, accusation, self-implication, and prayer--full of the music of a place from which Brownlee is forever removed but from which he will always hail. -SUSAN B.A. SOMERS-WILLETT

J. Scott Brownlee

Winner of the 2016 Bob Bush Memorial Award for Best First Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters. Winner of the 2015 Orison Poetry Prize. Finalist for the 2015 National Poetry Series. Finalist for the 2015 Writers' League of Texas Book Award. Named One of the Best Poetry Books of Winter 2016 by Foreword Reviews. . . . Set in the drought-plagued landscape of Central Texas, Requiem for Used Ignition Cap is a collection of lyric poems that chronicle life in and around Llano, Texas (population 3,033). Catfish heads hang on clotheslines waiting for the ensuing apocalypse. Blue heelers call out from drainage ditches, searching for friendly hands to lick. Hell-fire preachers lament the drowning of a young Pentecostal boy caught in the river's floodgate. Brownlee's poems meditate on the inescapability ofplace. When they give an inch, they do so to take a yard--all the while earnestly making a case for the rural condition's place in contemporary American poetry. Praise for the collection: Devotion, whether in poetry or prayer, requires one to pay attention.From the very first poem of this collection to the last, J. Scott Brownlee does exactly that. Whether it is the landscapes of Texas,soldiers home from Iraq, or the awkward ways in which we relate to each other, these poems pay close attention to details and transform them into something organic, whole, and incredibly moving. -C. DALE YOUNG, judge of the 2015 Orison Poetry Prize J. Scott Brownlee's Requiem for Used Ignition Cap pulses with imagery that grounds and levitates mind and body,crisscrossing some risky borderlands, but always in a zone of quotidian integrity. This collection, honed and shaped, is woven from ordinary lives and dreams, and each trope honors the earth we walk upon. There's a feeling in this collection--voices and rituals that spark the landscape. Brownlee juxtaposes mind and spirit, and there's nowhere these poems don't dare to go. -YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA The violence of men, the delicacy of their broken bodies, the religiosity of the town that raised them: all of these influence Requiem for Used Ignition Cap, which documents an America we rarely see. In J.Scott Brownlee's Llano, high school football heroes become PTS-affected war vets. The rural dead sing from the hollow flutes their bones leave in the dust. These are poems whose language begins with the body and the land. For Brownlee, the two are inseparable. -DORIANNE LAUX In his debut collection, J. Scott Brownlee writes a stunning ode to his rural Texas hometown and its fathers, brothers, and ghosts. Llano is a place where meth addicts score, wildflowers burn, hunters drink in their blinds, slain deer talk, soldiers return from duty with loaded guns,and the Wal-Mart sign glows brighter than Friday night's lights. Informs that barely contain their explosive contents, Brownlee's poems relate and interrogate what's expected of young White men growing up in the rural South. In doing so, they resist the erasure and nostalgia of some Southern literature and instead lay bare the benefits and violent trappings of small-town Christianity and masculinity. These poems are at once song, accusation, self-implication, and prayer--full of the music of a place from which Brownlee is forever removed but from which he will always hail. -SUSAN B.A. SOMERS-WILLETT

These letters are full of passion, humor, doubt, and spiritual yearning, and offer an intimate view of Melville's personality. Lyrical and effusive, they are literary works in themselves. This correspondence has been out of print for decades, and even when it was in print it appeared in scholarly volumes of Melville's complete correspondence, aimed at the academy. The Divine Magnet will provide the general literary public as well as the college classroom with a reliable and beautifully produced volume of Melville's letters to Hawthorne, along with supplemental material, highlighting the relationship between these luminaries of American letters.

The Divine Magnet: Herman Melville's Letters to Nathaniel Hawthorne

Paul Harding (Foreword)

Mark Niemeyer (editor / author of Introduction)

HERMAN, MELVILLE

Biographies & Memoirs

Finalist for the 2017 Kate Tufts Discovery Award 
Constellarium chronicles the author's gender transition from biological male to female, and engages the ontological quandaries that arise from this experience. Family history and religious heritage must be reckoned with along the way. In Rice's poems, the evolving nature of the self, the fluidity of identity, and the lasting influence of the past are all held up to the soul's penetrating gaze.

Constellarium

Jordan Rice

Finalist for the 2016 National Jewish Book Award in Poetry and the 2017 Paterson Poetry Prize Yehoshua November's second poetry collection, Two Worlds Exist, movingly examines the harmonies and dissonances involved in practicing an ancient religious tradition in contemporary America. November's beautiful and profound meditations on work and family life, and the intersections of the sacred and the secular, invite the reader--regardless of background--to imaginatively inhabit a life of religious devotion in the midst of our society's commotion.

Two Worlds Exist

Yehoshua November

In Ghost Child of the Atalanta Bloom Rebecca Aronson combines myth and memory, history and landscape, dream and the everyday in arresting, painterly poems that sweep the reader beyond the ordinary. With a practiced hand Aronson crafts shapely poems in which no word is wasted. In fact, nothing is wasted, and Aronson's poems redeem all manner of powerful images and experiences from time's grasp, forming a new mythology out of the raw material of her life and imagination.

Ghost Child of the Atalanta Bloom

Rebecca Aronson

After years of medicated struggle, 34-year-old Zoe quits her office job and moves into a trailer with her boyfriend in rural Maine against her family's wishes and her doctor's advice. After all, she has big plans with Gordy, a goateed vegetarian with thoughtful eyes and a job at a yoga studio and, as it turns out, an unfortunate desire to always be in control. But when a late-night argument turns violent, Zoe runs away in search of a mystical beach house she recalls from childhood, only to discover that in order to find it, she must reckon with her past. In electric prose that burns with wit and intelligence, Miss Portland explores what it means to give up everything in order to recover who you are.

Miss Portland: A Novel

David Ebenbach

United States

In a moving sequence of poems, Patrick Donnelly addresses a Jesus of his own Rilkean imagining--a personal, intimate, fluid manifestation of the divine who seamlessly embodies elements of Eastern and Western religious traditions.

Jesus Said: Poems

Patrick Donnelly

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Books by Orison Books

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Orison Books publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

I Scrape the Window of Nothingness: New & Selected Poems

I Scrape the Window of Nothingness: New & Selected Poems

Requiem for Used Ignition Cap (The Orison Poetry Prize)

Requiem for Used Ignition Cap (The Orison Poetry Prize)

The Divine Magnet: Herman Melville's Letters to Nathaniel Hawthorne

Constellarium

Two Worlds Exist

Ghost Child of the Atalanta Bloom

Miss Portland: A Novel

Jesus Said: Poems