The Many Names for Mother

By Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach

Winner of the 2018 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize

Ellen Bass, Judge

“A compelling book about origins—of ancestry, memory, and language”—Ellen Bass

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 emphasizes 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Release date: Sep 3, 2019
• ISBN: 9781631013676

Book preview

THE MANY NAMES FOR MOTHER

Wick Poetry First Book Series

The Many Names

for Mother

Poems by

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach

The Kent State University Press

Kent, Ohio

© 2019 by Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach

All rights reserved

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 2019010988

ISBN 978-1-60635-373-8

Manufactured in the United States of America

No part of this book may be used or reproduced, in any manner whatsoever, without written permission from the Publisher, except in the case of short quotations in critical reviews or articles.

The Wick Poetry Series is sponsored by the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Center and the Department of English at Kent State University.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Dasbach, Julia Kolchinsky, author.

Title: The many names for mother / poems by Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach.

Description: Kent, Ohio : The Kent State University Press, 2019. | Series: Wick poetry first book series

Identifiers: LCCN 2019010988 | ISBN 9781606353738 (pbk.)

Classification: LCC PS3604.A824 A6 2019 | DDC 811/.6--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019010988

23 22 21 20 19      5  4  3  2  1

For the mothers I come from

& the husband and son

who made me a mother

CONTENTS

Foreword by Ellen Bass

Afraid Ancestral

I.    DROWNED

Against Naming

For War and Water

Other women don’t tell you

Letter to My Son

Other women don’t tell you

Why Walk When We Can Fly

Genesis

Wikipedia for Name

Learning Yiddish

II.   LIGHT

The moon is showing

Other women don’t tell you

Why I Never Wore My Mother’s Pearls

My Mother as a Failed Sonnet, or Maybe Just a Forest

Why do giraffes climb trees?

Microsatellites

Take an x-ray of the sun, you’ll find

Mother’s 20-Year-Old Mattress

In Everything, He Finds the Moon

III. ANIMAL

Other women don’t tell you

The Question

Jokes Don’t Translate Well from Russian

The Book of Mothers

Other women don’t tell you

Everyone is terrified for their kids

While everything falls apart, imagine how you’ll teach your son about death

While everything falls apart, imagine how you’ll teach your son where he comes from

While everything falls apart, imagine how you’ll teach your son he is an animal too

While everything falls apart, imagine how you’ll teach your son about love

While everything falls apart, imagine how you’ll teach your son about guns

IV.  DROWNED ANIMAL OF LIGHT

Other women don’t tell you

Names of Svet

Diagnosis: Takotsubo

Other women don’t tell you

and each

the mourning customs of elephants

Other women don’t tell you

Those Who Give Birth to Goats

V.   HOME ETERNAL, RISING

there is no name for this.

Dyadya Voda

Other women tell you

bab’e lyeto / бабье лето /

Camp means field

Inheritance

Acknowledgments

Notes

FOREWORD

The Many Names for Mother is a compelling book about origins—of ancestry, memory, and language. Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach’s own origins began in 1987 in Ukraine—still a part of the Soviet Union then—and she came to the United States as a Jewish refugee