Unexploded Ordnance
What she felt. What they feared. How they survived. What they saw.
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
WINNER OF THE 2023 RESTLESS BOOKS PRIZE FOR NEW IMMIGRANT WRITING
In imaginative prose that interrogates the past with a poet’s curiosity and a scientist’s pen, Unexploded Ordnance seeks to answer how we are shaped by the stories we inherit.
After moving from Germany to the United States to work as a professor of biology, Catharina Coenen takes up residence in a second language to voice the questions she could not ask at home: what exactly did her family live through during World War II, and to what extent are they implicated? What terrors did her grandmother, mother, and aunt endure, and why are women’s wartime stories so hard to find? How much of the self is shaped by the traumas and passions that come to us through our DNA? Balancing literature with historical research, old letters with new conversations, Coenen peels back generational silences to walk alongside her grandmother as she comes of age during Hitler’s rise to power, watches her friends disappear one by one, and flees bombing raids with her tiny daughters, escaping from city to town, rented room to orphanage, parish house to hospital, trying to survive. Weaving reflections on language, biology, queerness, art, and memory, Coenen moves between the personal and the universal with stunning honesty and elegance.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Coenen, a professor of biology at Allegheny College, debuts with a lyrical and heartbreaking essay collection about her German ancestors' experiences of WWII. In "Red Currants," she recounts her grandmother Lotte's solidarity with a Jewish friend who was banned from the recreation area they both frequented after the Nazis came to power. She also reveals how one day, Lotte's "sweet" male friend (code for gay at the time) was suddenly taken away by the Gestapo. Coenen sees herself in her grandmother's stories, describing her own experience of falling in love with a woman while being married to a man. "Dropped Stitches" discusses how Elfriede, Lotte's older daughter, suffered an ear infection that the doctor warned her to keep secret lest the government declare her "feeble of mind" and place her in a euthanasia program. Later, Lotte revealed to Coenen that she believed Elfriede developed mental illness because the infection "perforated her brain." Throughout, Coenen artfully connects her family's personal experiences to larger traumas of the period. The result is a poetic and deeply felt exploration of the long shadow cast by the war.
