Unexploded Ordnance

Winner of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, Unexploded Ordnance is a probing and insightful portrait of how trauma takes shape in the body and persists across generations.

Which parts of my nervous system hold the fear of something that my grandmother, mother, aunt lived through? What came to me in my mother's genes, her mitochondria, or in the way my grandmother's hand might clutch my wrist? How do I comb these old afflictions from the tangled knot that is my present tense?

In unflinching, inventive, and deeply moving essays, Catharina Coenen interrogates how we are shaped by the stories and histories we inherit. After immigrating from Germany to the United States to work as a doctor of biology, Coenen takes up the pen and the microscope to examine her life alongside that of her mother and grandmother, both of whom lived through the second World War in Germany. With the precision and attentiveness of one performing a dissection, Coenen peels back generational silences and historical distortions to shed light on the terrors that her family members both experienced, and were implicated in. Weaving together reflections on language, science, memory, and coming to terms with her own queerness after two decades of marriage to a man, Coenen moves fluidly between personal and political insights with stunning honesty and elegance.