“Where are you from?” For Catherine Jagoe, a set of complicated assumptions often lies behind this seemingly banal question. While partly an immigrant narrative, Jagoe’s memoir in essays is not so much—or not only—about moving to the US and putting down roots but rather more about feeling perpetually in-between and never quite “home.” Throughout, Jagoe wrestles with what identity and fidelity mean for a woman with three nationalities, a job as a translator who frequently lives in a fourth country, a history of depression, and chronically divided allegiances. Together, these essays paint a deeply personal yet incredibly relatable portrait of what it means to be an American—and an immigrant—in the twenty-first century. 

Catherine Jagoe is a poet, essayist, and translator based in Madison, Wisconsin. Her collection Bloodroot won the Settlement House American Poetry Prize and the Council for Wisconsin Writers’ Edna Meudt Award, and Praying to the God of Small Things was named an Outstanding Work of Poetry by the Wisconsin Library Association. A recipient of a Pushcart Prize, among several other honors, she has published nine full-length books and four chapbooks across genres. Her personal essays have aired numerous times on Wisconsin Public Radio’s Wisconsin Life series.

Prologue
The Home Goal: Variations on a Theme
Language Lessons
Watermarked
Brief Autobiography in Odors
Voracious
A Ring of Bells
On the Van Galder from Wisconsin to O’Hare
Homecoming Stew
Querencia
On Infidelity
Splitting
Fossils
Things That Matter
Sessile
June and the Clock
The Sense of an Ending
Finding the Springs
Acknowledgments