Overview
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.
This book title, Unexploded Ordnance, ISBN: 9781632064059, by Catharina Coenen, published by Restless Books (October 28, 2025) is available in paperback. Our minimum order quantity is 25 copies. All standard bulk book orders ship FREE in the continental USA and delivered in 4-10 business days.
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