Poetry and the Language of Oppression

Carmen Bugan, George Orwell Prize Fellow, is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Lilies from America: New and Selected Poems (a PBS Special Commendation), a memoir, Burying the Typewriter: Childhood Under the Eye of the Secret Police (a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week) and a monograph on Seamus Heaney and East European Poetry in Translation: Poetics of Exile. She was the 2018 Helen DeRoy Professor in Honors at the University of Michigan, a Chargée de Cours at the Université de Fribourg in Switzerland, and taught in the Continuing Education department at the University of Oxford, while she was a Creative Arts Fellow in Literature at Wolfson College. She has a doctorate in English literature from Balliol College, Oxford. She currently teaches at the Gotham Writers' Workshop in Manhattan.

... beautiful and intensely scrupulous ... Throughout the book, Bugan's own highly regarded poetry serves to distil the essence of her far-ranging political and cultural analysis and to re-enact it in verse that strikes close to home -- home that for her stricken family was a target of Nicolae Ceaulsescu's fascist regime.

• Preface Introduction: "Visiting the Country of My Birth" 1: Sounding the Deeps of Nature: Lyric Language and the Language of Oppression 2: The "lyric I": Private and Public Narratives 3: Resettling in the English Language 4: Artistic Distance and the Language of Oppression 5: Writing in Turbulent Times Conclusion: Lumina Mea