Do Not Return - Poetry by Julia Knobloch

Publication Date: July 1, 2019
Paperback, 96 pages
ISBN: 978-1-937968-54-0

Available from Small Press Distribution

Julia Knobloch has led a peripatetic life, from her native Germany, through years spent in several countries (her time in Buenos Aires inspired many poems here, as well as the cover image), to her current home in Brooklyn, so it comes as no surprise that she would speak in her opening poem of longing, of “expecting to find a home in the space / between arrivals and departures.” It is that “space between” that she probes in these exquisitely rendered, and rending, poems; and appropriately, the mood of the collection is best expressed by a German word that has no precise English equivalent – Sehnsucht.

Her journey through this space takes place across three dimensions of experience. The first is heritage, as the discovery of a forgotten (or suppressed) Jewish ancestor propels her into an examination of her childhood and the embrace of a new identity and faith. In a poem to “My Unknown Jewish Ancestor” she acknowledges

Your blood is thin in my veins,
after generations skipped and lost.

Even so, she pleads

but I am your long-lost sister. Bless me.

The second dimension is geographic, as she negotiates a nomadic life that crosses continents, cultures, and languages. This is her personal time in the wilderness, a time she recognizes may never be ended. In the title poem, which closes the collection, she responds to those who wonder why she does not simply go home, in terms of biblical resonance and authority:

Why stay?
I want to.
I left.
G-d promised
land
blessings
a name.

The third dimension is the most intimate, as she describes her experience as a woman on her own in the world, traversing the promise and perils of relationships, her unfulfilled desire for a family:

I lost two children before I knew
if they were sons or daughters.
I lost my love on the first day of the seventh month.
I lost my laughter in the year that followed.

But even if the laughter was lost, her language and her longing remain, and fill these pages with unforgettable emotion. With Sehnsucht.


Praise for Julia Knobloch and Do Not Return

In Julia Knobloch’s knock-out debut volume, Do Not Return, her unalloyed confidence skips over any literary initiation and immerses the reader in wholly absorbing poems which travel the world “expecting to find a home in the space / between arrivals and departures.” Synthesizing the complexity of her family history within WWII Europe, she says “what is gone remains,” as do, for us, the images of “oranges and sycamores in dusky air,” and “sunburnt terrace tiles under naked feet,” long after we turn the pages. “We know where to go, we have been here before,” Knobloch writes of a far- flung beach, and she could also be describing the canny rightness of our experience as readers; as she plays hide and seek with boundaries, love, and God, we become both awestruck tourists and grateful natives in a land she has founded.

—Jessica Greenbaum, author of Spilled and Gone

Through numerous countries and cultures, from ancient pasts to longed-for futures, Julia Knobloch’s debut collection sings her world with a voice that finds itself both belonging to—and a foreigner in—each moment, a world where “the only word for me is stranger / but I am your long-lost sister.” With knowing tenderness and intent curiosity, these poems traverse lands, languages, and rituals, spiritual and sacred, searching for home, for love.

—Laura Eve Engel, author of Things That Go

Knobloch’s poems are elegant, spare, authoritative. Every poem in Do Not Return is a pleasurable and thought-provoking journey. This is a wonderful and deeply moving book.

—Yehoshua November, author of Two Worlds Exist and God’s Optimism

Sorrow is the word that comes to mind when reading Julia Knobloch’s Do Not Return. Not sadness or melancholy or heartbreak or grief, but sorrow, this more old-fashioned word that’s all but out of use in America, that comes from the Old World Knobloch tenderly evokes in poem after poem, the one she can’t return to, that is irrevocably lost. Something more final, more devastating, more Heathcliff on the moors—a feeling largely missing from contemporary American poetry. In poems like “The State of Things,” “Daylight Saving Time,” and the utterly gut-wrenching “Industry City,” where she elegizes the death of a bike that’s come to represent all her immigrant “dreams lived but unfulfilled” in New York City, Knobloch writes with a sorrow that startles you and shakes you and stays with you, making you, ironically, want to return again.

—Jason Koo, author of More Than Mere Light

Author photo by Jody Christopherson

Julia was interviewed on ReformJudaism.org about Do Not Return. Click here to read the interview.

Julia Knobloch was born and raised in Germany and has lived in France, Portugal, and Argentina. She is a former documentary filmmaker, a member of the Sweet Action poetry collective, and the recipient of a 2017 Brooklyn Poets fellowship. She currently resides in Los Angeles.