Description
Poetry. Women's Studies. In 1989 the five members of the Bugan family were allowed to leave Ceausescu's Romania with one suitcase each and death-threats in their wake. In 2010 the poet Carmen Bugan took possession of 1,500 pages of Securitate files on her father and in 2013 a further 3,000 pages of secret files on her mother, sister, brother and herself. RELEASING THE PORCELAIN BIRDS is about the transformation of that extraordinary history of Cold War Europe into poetry; it is about writing the self free and how poetry drawn in a new and tender narrative can do this. In this manner RELEASING THE PORCELAIN BIRDS is one continuous poem which faces down dispossession and reaches towards exuberance.
Author Bio
Carmen Bugan's books include the memoir Burying the Typewriter: Childhood Under the Eye of the Secret Police (Picador), which has received international critical praise, the Bread Loaf Conference Bakeless Prize for Non-Fiction, and was a finalist in the George Orwell Prize for Political Writing, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Her collections of poems are LILIES FROM AMERICA: NEW & SELECTED POEMS, RELEASING THE PORCELAIN BIRDS, and House of Straw (all from Shearsman Books), and Crossing the Carpathians (Carcanet). She is also the author of a critical study on Seamus Heaney and East European Poetry in Translation: Poetics of Exile. Her work has been translated into several languages and she is a regular reviewer for Harvard Review Online. Bugan was awarded a large grant from the Arts Council of England, was a Creative Arts Fellow in Literature at Wolfson College, Oxford University, was a Hawthornden Fellow, the Helen DeRoy Professor in Honors at the University of Michigan, and is a George Orwell Prize Fellow. She has a doctorate in English literature from Balliol College, Oxford University.
Author City: STONY BROOK, NY USA