Interrogation Room

Jennifer Kwon Dobbs is also the author of Paper Pavilion (White Pine Press Poetry Prize 2007) and the chapbook Notes from a Missing Person (Essay Press 2015). Her work appears in Crazyhorse, Indiana Review, Jubilat, and elsewhere.

“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. And the answers she offers, in both poetry and prose, in lyrical meditations and stories and erasures, build a bridge to the lost world of her Korean ancestors, where families feed on absence, dreaming of reunification. 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‘Readers of THE INTERROGATION ROOM by Jennifer Kwon Dobbs quickly realize that the "room" of the book's title is not a place of questioning-by-force. Rather we see that these poems are a profound  "cordon sanitaire"  space in the consciousness of a poet who is "interrogating" her own lost history, her stolen past, most dramatically enacted in her devoted search for her Korean birth mother. The unrestrained human imagination has no DMZ's, 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 - epitomized by these words of direct address to her mother:"You definitely were, because you gave me life, yet you lie beyond narration."  The mysteries of the past may be "beyond narration" yet they are not beyond this poet's powerful precise and intuitive revelations: annunciatiory "answers" to unanswerable questions of the heart.”—Carol Muske-Duke“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

• CONTENTSI confess I traveled | 8Here are notes rolled into plugs | 9Insert children into crates | 10Take young men as coal miners | 11The Origins Inside Kim Dae Shik | 12A Forest in Jeju, Southern Korea | 14Northern Korea Postcards | 16Reading Keith Wilson’s “The Girl” | 22Birthfather | 24This— | 25///Notes from a Missing Person | 30///Parasitic Twin | 45반 갑 습 니 다 | 51///White Horse | 55A House in Nicosia | 56A Small Guest | 58Moon Jar | 60Fox | 61Birdsong for Ten Thousand Years | 62Beetle | 63Yi Sang’s Room | 65///Birthmother | 69Note Left at a U.S. Camptown Brothel for My Missing Imo | 71Orphan Rescue | 72Red Baiting | 73How to Eat Your Love | 74Korean Heritage House | 80The Telling | 83///Acknowledgements | 85Notes | 87