"who else would ask / for such a violence": A review of Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach’s 40 Weeks

 
 
 
 
 

Not too long ago, someone on Twitter lamented the rise of so-called “mommy poems,” implying that the subject of motherhood did not lend itself to serious verse. Categorically false, this statement was shut down swiftly and succinctly, writers coming out of the virtual woodwork to contest it. Motherhood has been written about at length from a variety of lenses, whole magazines having been dedicated to exploring that frame of existence. Besides the clarification I must make that the idea of “serious verse” is entirely subjective, and more than a little coded here, it is also worth mentioning that the phrasing of that sentiment is rooted in pervasive cultural beliefs about the role of the mother. These societal expectations are myriad: that the mother is a means to an end and loses all personhood in the bearing of a child, the mother’s happiness is therefore entirely forfeit, and indeed, that stories that surround women’s bodies that do not center around their sexual desirability are one, worthless and two, too uncomfortable for public consumption.

It was a delight, then, to open Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach’s newest poetry collection, 40 Weeks, which directly confronts and takes to task these assumptions about mothering. Dasbach not only writes beautifully about what could be called navel-gazing, an outdated term that has been often used to minimize the contributions of women and marginalized communities in literature, but she takes you directly to the brutal, bloody umbilical cord of that navel. Mothering is not a new subject to Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach. Dasbach’s first collection, entitled The Many Names for Mother (The Kent State University Press, 2019) described as “an exploration of intergenerational motherhood,” interrogates the twin pillars of ancestry and motherhood, ideas of lineage, and traveling to death camp sites while pregnant with her first child, her son. These themes continue in her second collection, Don’t Touch the Bones (Lost Horse Press, 2020), which is documentary poetics at its most heartbreaking, being an unflinching lyric witness (to use a term Dasbach used in her doctoral dissertation) to the stories of Jews recently emigrated from Ukraine and diasporic violence.

40 Weeks is a collection that revolves around a simple conceit: for every week Dasbach was pregnant with her daughter, she wrote a poem based on the fruit or vegetable that most closely reflected the baby’s growing weight and size. A cornucopia of associations, her daughter Remy grows over the weeks from a poppy seed to a lemon, an apple, a spaghetti squash, jicama, to pumpkin. The laser focus Dasbach has on etymology and naming—etymology being a large part of her other collections—is out in full force in 40 Weeks. Dasbach continues the etymological strand in Week 4: Poppy Seed, “One, enough to name him, / parent, rooted in / pere— ‘to produce, / bring forth,’ crops or harvest, / but what flora yields / a single seed?” (7). Dasbach then writes in Week 25: Rutabaga, “and you look up / where perfect comes from: etymology / easier to bare : than skin : from Middle / English and Old French parfait : / finished : complete : brought to full / development : but there are still so many / rivers to grow” (45). Through such passages, etymology becomes an act of incantation, a conscious, deliberate remembering of those who came before and the failings of language at times to contextualize all of our lived experiences, like how in Week 9: Grape, where Dasbach recalls being called louse by other children for being Jewish, for having her head shaved, and refuses to shave her son’s head in the wake of a lice outbreak at his school, encouraging him instead to sit with the girl who had the lice first. Even the naming of his classmate affected by the lice—Evelyn—speaks to this care Dasbach has with language, this unflinching attention to its failures and weaponization in tandem with its capacity for connection and comfort. 

Even more compelling than this idea of linguistic legacy is Dasbach’s awareness of the world she leaves her children. The collection is bookended by poems that bring nature to the forefront with titles like “Nature must be a mother” (1) and “Why have children when the world is ending?” (87). Early on in the collection, we have invocations of bodies of water, both as a metaphor for the body’s boundless capabilities and intergenerational crossing of borders, but also as a resource in perpetual danger, like women’s bodies. These bodies of water ultimately give way to flame, to the impression of a world on fire and everything making a slow crawl towards death, but there exists in their mentioning the kernels of hope. Dasbach writes in Week 1: The removal, “who named you / ocean / river / well / that’s it she says / puddle / flood / excess” (2). Remy, upon her arrival, is given this loving epithet, “...Remy Luray, one / who rows a crooked river, a cavern, / the sky, one who lures your body to remember” (83).

This duality of mother and daughter as rivers connecting to a larger ocean of love, memory, and togetherness is gorgeously rendered, and speaks to a larger theme of hope, one that ends the collection determined to celebrate what life there is to live. There is a compulsion in poetry to end things on an upbeat ending just so the reader isn’t totally devastated under the weight of a collection’s subject matter. Such decision making can often come off as contrived and cheesy, but Dasbach’s ending rejects that compulsion. It is hopeful, but it is a hope that’s been earned, one that dares someone to challenge it and furiously protects the idea of joy despite, despite, despite. 40 Weeks is a collection I know will only become more and more resonant overtime and is simultaneously a brilliant offering to literature and defiant middle finger to those who wish the stories of mothers would go untold.

Kathryn Bratt-Pfotenhauer’s work has previously been published or is forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, Crazyhorse, Poet Lore, Beloit Poetry Journal, and others. The child of United States Foreign Service officers, their work is rooted in a global consciousness, having lived most of their formative years abroad and studied at Trinity College Dublin. They have a degree in Russian language, literature, and culture from Bryn Mawr College. The recipient of a 2023 Pushcart Prize, they have won awards from the Ledbury Poetry Festival and Bryn Mawr College, as well as received support from The Seventh Wave and Tin House. Their chapbook, Small Geometries, is forthcoming with Ethel Zine & Micro Press in April/May 2023. They are a second-year in Syracuse University's MFA program. Find their work at Home | Kathryn Bratt-Pfotenhauer (kcbrattpfotenhauer.wixsite.com).

 
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