Releasing the Porcelain Birds Author:Carmen Bugan 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... more » 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.« less