Releasing the Porcelain Birds

In 1989 the five members of the Bugan family were allowed to leave Ceau?escu's Romania with one suitcase each and death-threats in their wake. In 2010 the poet Carmen Bugan took possession of 1500 pages of Securitate files on her father and in 2013 a further 3000 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.