Tristia

In Tristia, Carmen Bugan tests the lyric against loss once again, as everything collapses around her, but this time much closer to home. These are poems about forging a stronger self in the fires of her lifetime, whether they are the forest fires that cover the American continent, the war in Ukraine, or her own world turned to ashes. The speaker in the poem 'Enheduana' laments:

He spat on my oven full of food,

Walked over my baskets full of bread,

Soiled the marriage bed, left the children crying,

And my heart toiling with heaven and earth.

Her poems insist on the beauty of the natural world, itself under threat, as a source of strength, as in 'Hawk,' where the speaker prays:

Hawk, take everything

That is weak in me,

In your claws: eat it.

Leave me wise and patient.