The poetry collection "it skips a generation" travels back and forth in time, from before the Japanese Internment to the present. It examines the author's relationship with their grandfather (Ojisan) Jack who (along with his mother and sister) was imprisoned at Tule Lake Relocation Center. The poems consider intergenerational trauma & healing, and what survives. “it skips a generation” also reflects on Lubar's own mixed-race and queer (nonbinary, sapphic, femme) identity. They say of "it skips a generation," "I've felt a responsibility to tell this story of the Internment, particularly due to the importance of representation. I grew up without seeing or reading anything about people who looked like me, or had the background that I did. I hope to change this."
 
Advance Praise for It Skips A Generation
 
"While confronting all that condemns the mixed-race descendants of Japanese Americans as “other” in America, Lubar’s collection lays plain the complicated tension of the speaker’s resistance to and simultaneous longing for her Japanese heritage. Peppered with brackets that add to this making and remaking of the speaker’s sense of self, it skips a generation is ultimately a hard-won account of loss, acceptance, and the pride and grief that come with knowing “I inherit it all.” – Eugenia Leigh, author of Bianca
 
"Love permeates It Skips a Generation in surprising ways, in ways that unsettle familial history with curiosity and determination. This book interrogates what it means to belong and how that interrogation can become a pursuit of love and understanding. Lubar carries us through these difficult questions, refusing easy answers with a line that won’t leave me anytime soon—“And I’m still exotic, too, and so lucky, too, to seem so foreign and dangerous and willing to bite.” – Su Cho, author of The Symmetry of Fish
 
"Alison Lubar opens up the hopeful equation--that one can survive, even evade the traumas of war and internment by bringing a time traveling and capacious attention to bear on a mixed-race family. Loved ones shimmer to life in these sun-filled tableaux of affection, puns, pain d'epi, squid broth, and observation. It is no small act of care to give eternal home both to elders and to one's own defiance--in poetry." – Cynthia Arrieu-King, author of Futureless Languages and Continuity
 
42 pages.
8.5 x 5.5 size paperback book, perfectbound with spine.
ISBN: 979-8-88862-260-5
Published on September 26, 2023.​
 
Alison Lubar teaches high school English by day and yoga by night. They are a queer, nonbinary, mixed-race femme whose life work (aside from wordsmithing) has evolved into bringing mindfulness practices, and sometimes even poetry, to young people. Their debut chapbook, Philosophers Know Nothing About Love, is out now with Thirty West (May 2022); their second, sweet euphemism, is forthcoming with CLASH!, an imprint of Mouthfeel Press, in 2023. You can find out more at http://www.alisonlubar.com/ or on Twitter @theoriginalison