Anca Vlasopolos is a poet and novelist. She is professor of English at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan and director of the university's comparative literature program. She has published a critical study of Coleridge, Baudelaire, and Yeats, a mystery novel, and two chapbooks of poetry. She lives in Grosse Pointe, Michigan.

• Foreword Chronology 1. Mouthfuls 2. Gatekeepers 3. Out of the Mouth 4. The Vocabulary of Faith 5. Mud Miracles 6. To Eat or Not to Eat 7. Bucharest 8. Contingencies 9. Telling Tales 10. Growing Boys 11. Paris 12. Brussels 13. Walls 14. Frankfurt Passage 15. Misplacing Detroit 16. Where All the Lights Were Bright 17. Variations on the Pastoral 18. Sub-Urban Skies 19. Endings, Continuities 20. Returns

Neither Anca nor her mother has a return address, and this absence, like her mother's stories of Auschwitz, sensitively retold, haunts the book. -- Robert Eaglestone Times Literary Supplement [Vlasopolos's] insightful autobiography easily reads like fiction... Vlasopolos is clearly as talented as she is erudite... her memoir conveys... a unique perspicacity worthy of accolades. Library Journal