The Many Names for Mother (Wick First Book) - Softcover

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach (author)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 160635373X ISBN 13: 9781606353738

Publisher: The Kent State University Press, 2019

Synopsis

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.

A series of poems titled “Other women don’t tell you” becomes a refrain throughout the book, echoing the unspoken or taboo aspects of motherhood, from pregnancy to the postpartum body. The Many Names for Mother emphasises that there is no single narrative of motherhood, no finite image of her body or its transformation, and no unified name for any of this experience. The collection is a reminder of the mothers we all come from, urging us to remember both our named and unnamed pasts.

About this title

About the Author

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach 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.

Edition details

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Publication date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 160635373X
• ISBN 13: 9781606353738
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 104