Julia Kolchinsky’s poem “I do not mention the war in my birthplace to my six-year-old son but somehow his body knows” was featured on Maggie Smith’s podcast The Slowdown.
“Today’s poem,” says Maggie Smith, “made my breath catch in my throat, because it captures so well these beautiful, and sometimes heartbreaking, conversations that parents have with their children.”
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.”