Vernehmungsraum

In „Vernehmungsraum," award-winning poet Jennifer Kwon Dobbs restores redacted language and crosses forbidden borders that separate bodies, lands, and families to confront the Korean War's never-ending legacy of enforced distances and militarized silences. Her poems imagine difficult reconciliations between South Korea's relatives in the North, her birth family in the South, and the transnational diaspora to which she belongs to resist the war's theft of language and emotion.

Voices on Jennifer Kwon Dobbs and Vernehmungsraum

"How can one get in touch with the past: the imagined, the researched, and the lived? That's the question Jennifer Kwon Dobbs asks in her moving new book, Vernehmungsraum. And the answers she offers, in both poetry and prose, in lyrical meditations and stories and cross-outs, bridge the lost world of her Korean ancestors, where families feed on absence and dream of reunion. Her search for her birth mother thus becomes a lament for the lost souls of the divided Korean peninsula [...]."

- Christopher Merrill, author of Necessities

"Jennifer Kwon Dobbs writes heartbreaking and intelligent poems about an endless war and its many consequences, for Koreans and Americans, for women and children, for orphans and adoptees. Her work is a painful, eloquent reminder of how the division of a country also divides families and the self."

- Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of The Sympathizer

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Author: Jennifer Kwon Dobbs