ABOUT THIS BOOK

Finalist, 2025 Miller Williams Poetry Prize

Julia Kolchinsky’s Parallax offers a lyrical narrative of parenting a neurodiverse child under the shadow of the ongoing war in Ukraine, the poet’s birthplace. As her child expresses a fascination with death and violence, Kolchinsky struggles to process the war unfolding far away, on the same soil where so many of her ancestors perished during the Holocaust.

Anchored by a series of poems that look to the moon, this collection explores displaced perspectives and turns to the celestial to offer meditations on how elements formed in distant stars account for so much of our human DNA. In these poems, writes series editor Patricia Smith, Kolchinsky “clutches at a feeling of home that is both unfamiliar and deeply treasured, longs for all that was left behind, struggles to come to terms with the rampant violence devastating a landscape that still, in so many encouraging and heartbreaking ways, belongs to her.”

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Julia Kolchinsky (formerly Dasbach) emigrated from Dnipro, Ukraine, when she was six years old. She is the author of three previous poetry collections: The Many Names for Mother, Don’t Touch the Bones, and 40 Weeks. Her writing has appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, and American Poetry Review. She is assistant professor of English and creative writing at Denison University.

REVIEWS

“Strong voices live in this book—as near as the poet’s son, and as far as her homeland, Ukraine, currently in the midst of horrific war—and yet somehow so much wonder is delivered via Kolchinsky’s line breaks and metaphors, so much love is given by what is said, and what is withheld, as is proper for a lyric poet. In the end, this is most of all a book about being a mother, which is to say, it’s about the universe.”
—Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa

“In these exquisite poems, Kolchinsky writes about a world in tumult, imagining the alchemy that may possibly create gold or that may cause what is known to combust. Meanwhile in deft, loving, and elegant gestures, poems about the stakes that are closest to us flit in adoring musical lines. Even though the world may seem like it is splitting apart, the insistence and love of these poems are enough to stitch what matters together.”
—Oliver de la Paz, author of The Diaspora Sonnets and The Boy in the Labyrinth

Love presses against despair in this exquisitely crafted homage to motherhood in a time of war. Ukrainian-born poet Julia Kolchinsky honors the parallax of parenting a neurodivergent child whose fascination with daily physical hurt is juxtaposed with the history and ongoing violence of the poet’s homeland. You’ll want to read and re-read this smart, honest, and complex collection that ultimately affirms ‘we all hold fragments / of first light.’”
—Ellen Bass, author of Indigo and The Human Line

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

Series Editor's Preface

INITIAL SINGULARITY

On the 100th day of war in my birthplace

I do not mention the war to my six-year-old son but somehow his body knows.

Why write another poem about the moon

Watching Masha i Medved as Russia Invades Ukraine

Dear Fellow Ukrainian Poet-Mama,

The Past Doesn’t Rise Like Smoke

Omen

The Ukrainian Flag Stares through the Balsam Fir from Larry’s Farms

Why write another poem about the moon?

II. HYDROGEN

On Raising Mountains

Why write another poem about the moon

It’s not the dark

Cataloguing Home, Dnipro to Little Rock

When my son says , I don’t love you, I want to tell him about lilacs

Am I a bad mother:

Hurricane

Hail

What does the vulture say to the snowman(?) or how my son is learning to tell jokes(.)

Summer Camp Can’t Fit the Shape of Flame

Violet Is Another Name for Touch

When a friend texted to say her son’s fish died & the child won’t stop wailing

Since becoming my son’s only friend, I’ve had to become Baba Yaga.

Ferris Wheel

Why write another poem about the moon?

One Year Later

Tell me it gets easier

Why write another poem about the moon

After the third snow day in a row, I’m ready to throw the towel

I bring poets from Lviv, Ukraine , to my college class in Arkansas

Dear Fellow Ukrainian Poet-Mama,

The day after the longest day of the year

Okean Means Endless

Sour

Why write another poem about the moon?

As Flesh, Not Stone

Against Water

Listening to Michael Jackson in a Closet

Dear Sol’nishko, Little Sun,

Two Years Later

You Ask to Count All the Stars

Acknowledgments

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