Parallax by Julia Kolchinsky, a finalist for the 2025 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, has been reviewed in Publishers Weekly.
“How does one stay vigilant to the horrors of the world when the ‘wallet’s empty and sink is full’? asks Kolchinsky (40 Weeks) in this reflective work of witness. The poet, who left Ukraine with her family at age six, toggles painfully between watching the war unfold in Ukraine and caring for her daughter and neurodiverse son in the U.S. As in her previous collection, which chronicled her second pregnancy, motherhood is a central theme. Yet this new portrait of motherhood against a backdrop of war is ragged and despairing. Kolchinsky expands the motif to touch on her mother tongue, her motherland, and the obliteration of physical autonomy that comes with motherhood. On the 100th day of the war, she writes, ‘My tongue/ hurts my mouth… I claw at my scalp to find/ unintended gifts my children/ left behind—lime playdough, floss, an uneaten/ french fry. Their bodies use mine/ as treasure chest & waste bin.’ In ‘Tell me it gets easier,’ she does nothing to soften the blow, telling new parents that no, it doesn’t get easier: ‘The depths/ are endless not because/ they do not end but because/ we’ve never reached the bottom.’ And yet, ‘endurance is a resistance all its own.’ Readers will find this a moving and impactful collection.”
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.”