"If it is the duty of the scientist to explore the natural world, Coenen does it beautifully by turning her focus to our most basic makeup: the stories we carry in our genes. We are all beneficiaries of her courage and determination."
--New Immigrant Writing Judges

*Winner of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, Catharina Coenen’s 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 she had immigrated from Germany to the United States to pursue her career as a doctor of biology, Coenen began to untangle her experience from that of her grandmother and mother, both of whom lived through the second World War in Germany. With the precision and attentiveness of one performing a dissection, Coenen critically peels back generational silences and historical distortions to shed light on the terrors her family members both experienced and were implicated in. Weaving together reflections on language, science, memory, and her own coming to terms with her queerness after two decades of marriage to a man, Coenen moves fluidly between personal and political insights with stunning honesty and elegance.

Catharina Coenen is a first-generation German immigrant to the northwestern “chimney” of Pennsylvania, where she teaches biology at Allegheny College. Much of her creative work addresses transgenerational effects of war. Her essays have appeared or are forthcoming in The American Scholar, The Southampton Review Online, Superstition Review, Appalachian Heritage, The Christian Science Monitor, the Nonfiction Food anthology (Woodhall Press), and elsewhere. Her poetry has appeared in the Spectral Lines anthology (Alternating Current Press) and is forthcoming in The Coil and Split Rock Review.