Yasmin Mariam Kloth Knihy

Ancestry Unfinished: Poems of a Lost Generation explores what it means to be from "here" through the author’s lens as a first generation American-born daughter whose parents emigrated to the U.S. and Canada from Cairo, Egypt in the 1970s. The cultural (Egyptian) and ancestral (Lebanese/Syrian) layers of her family memories are revealed in poems through the generations of women—grandmothers, mothers, and daughters—who taught her “how the felucca travels;” and how to mourn the losses she knows her own daughter collects each year she’s “pull(ed) in a current/further from her heritage.”