Ask No Questions

With a third of Australians born, and around half with one parent born overseas, migration stories are a crucial part of our national experience. In her verse novel, Ask No Questions, Eva Collins writes spare, affecting lines about her own experience as a teenager when her parents decided to emigrate from Poland to Australia. She captures the loss and gain, grief and celebration with great poignancy. Simply written but deeply moving, Ask No Questions is accessible poetry that is particularly suited for young adult readers.

A beautifully constructed and engaging work. Ask No Questions charts an emigrant's journey with great clarity, humour, pathos, and a disarming directness that will connect with readers of all ages, and inspire others to recount their own stories of leaving their homelands to begin life anew on distant shores. — Arnold Zable

Eva's poetry is spare. She uses neither filler nor fancy, but communicates directly in an almost William Carlos Williams style. However, the sum result is similar: a poetry that is unembellished and real; personal yet unabashedly other; grounded—often with wit—in the sometimes sad and always unrelenting factual basis of the past, and the ongoing present of what-is. Hers is an important voice. — Jordie Albiston

Eva Collins has, through this series of deft and crafted observations, distilled the mid-twentieth century experience of European migration to Australia. It is books such as this, combined with a growing Indigenous literature, that will shape Australia's deepest, richest, and most lasting sense of itself into the future. You cannot tell such a story until you have learned to live in two places at once, and Ms Kovalski-Collins has achieved that magical act in Ask No Questions with brilliance, wit, directness, and intelligence in her own distinctively sparkling verse. A joy to read, it is a book to be grateful for. — Kevin Brophy

I found Ask No Questions to be most enlightening, original, and great reading and think this would be an invaluable educational resource. This is a very important memoir that makes up Australia's rich Migration story. — Hass Dellal