The Many Names for Mother
Published on 30. August 2019
Book
Paperback/Softback
104 pages
978-1-60635-373-8 (ISBN)
Description
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.
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.
Reviews / Votes
Dasbach's collection is masterfully ordered to carry the reader through the weight and the gift of intergenerational inheritance. The history Dasbach has inherited, and which sits at the heart of these poems, is Jewish, Ukrainian, U.S.-American, and matrilineal. If it is not always an easy inheritance, it is one that Dasbach's poems honor and carry forward.... Dasbach's poems delve into motherhood in all its complications in a way I didn't know I needed to read until I read them."-The Adroit JournalMore details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Kent, OH
United States
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Dimensions
Height: 213 mm
Width: 136 mm
Thickness: 10 mm
Weight
174 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-60635-373-8 (9781606353738)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach
Many Names for Mother
E-Book
09/2019
The Kent State University Press
€21.99
Available for download
Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach
Many Names for Mother
E-Book
09/2019
The Kent State University Press
€21.99
Available for download
Person
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.