Parallax

About

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.”

Julia Kolchinsky’s “I do not mention the war in my birthplace to my six-year-old son but somehow his body knows” at The Slowdown.

Author

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.

Review

“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.”
—Publishers Weekly, April 2025

Praise

“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

Series

Every year, the University of Arkansas Press accepts submissions for the Miller Williams Poetry Series and from the books selected awards the $5,000 Miller Williams Poetry Prize in the following summer. For almost a quarter century the press has made this series the cornerstone of its work as a publisher of some of the country’s best new poetry. The series and prize are named for and operated to honor the cofounder and longtime director of the press, Miller Williams.

“I love poems that vivify and disturb,” says series editor Patrica Smith. “No matter what genre we write in, we’re all essentially storytellers — but it’s poets who toil most industriously, telling huge unwieldy stories within tight and gorgeously controlled confines, stories that are structurally and sonically adventurous, and it’s magic every time it happens. Simply put, when I read a poetry book, I want something to shift in my chest. I want my world to change.”