Winner of the 2018 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize
The Many Names for Mother is an exploration of intergenerational motherhood; its poems reach toward the future even as they reflect on the past. This evocative collection hovers around history, trauma, and absence—from ancestral histories of anti-Semitic discrimination in the former Soviet Union to the poet’s travels, while pregnant with her son, to death camp sites in Poland. As a descendant of Holocaust survivors, Dasbach ponders how the weight of her Jewish-refugee immigrant experience comes to influence her raising of a first-generation, bilingual, and multiethnic American child.
Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach emigrated from Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine, as a Jewish refugee when she was six years old. She holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Oregon and is a PhD candidate in comparative literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of the chapbook The Bear Who Ate the Stars, and her recent poems are forthcoming from or have appeared in POETRY, American Poetry Review, and TriQuarterly, among others. She also writes Other women don’t tell you, a blog about motherhood.
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