Interrogation Room
"Timely" -- The New York Times
"Vigorous restlessness" -- World Literature Today
“Elegant, forceful” — Electric Literature
"An austere singing" -- 4square review
“Elegantly crafted and exquisitely arresting“ — Asian American Literature Fans
Winner, Association for Asian American Studies Book Award in Creative Writing: Poetry
Finalist, Copper Nickel/Milkweed Editions Jake Adam York Prize
“A timely book, and a needed book, Kwon Dobbs’s second collection Interrogation Room is a tour de force of documents, images, handwritten notes, erasures, and poetry, that provides a diasporic healing through its haunting lyrical experimentalism. As lyric interrogations, the poems transform the limits of history, the personal, poetry, and the family. In doing so, this innovative poetry collection by Kwon Dobbs will invigorate and move poets and readers in Asian American Studies and beyond for generations to come.” — judges’ citation, Association for Asian American Studies Book Award in Creative Writing: Poetry
Sample poems appear in AGNI, Blackbird, Columbia Review: A Journal of Art and Literature, Diode Poetry Journal, Indiana Review, Jubilat, and are anthologized in One for the Money: The Sentence as a Poetic Form and The World I Leave You: Asian American Poets on Faith & Spirit.
Available at your favorite independent bookseller, Consortium Book Sales and Distribution, and everywhere.
“How to connect to the past, imagined, researched, and lived? This is the question that Jennifer Kwon Dobbs asks in her haunting new book, Interrogation Room . . . Her search for her birth mother thus becomes a lament for the lost souls of the divided Korean Peninsula, reminding readers that wherever we come from each of us "dwells at the border, adopted by all four directions" of the wind. This is our shared homeland.”
-Christopher Merrill, author of Necessities
“Jennifer Kwon Dobbs writes visceral and intelligent poems about an unending war and its many consequences, for Koreans and Americans, for women and children, for orphans and adoptees. Her work is a painful, eloquent reminder about how dividing a country also divides families and selves.”
-Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of The Sympathizer
The unrestrained human imagination has no DMZs, no 'North/South' borders: In this spirit Jennifer Kwon Dobbs crosses hidden frontiers of the self as she overcomes restricted travel, restricted speech in a divided country. Her un-redacted revelations lead to extraordinary discoveries.”
- Carol Muske Dukes, author of Blue Rose