The Many Names for Mother
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.

1130721105
The Many Names for Mother
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.

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The Many Names for Mother

The Many Names for Mother

by Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach
The Many Names for Mother
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The Many Names for Mother

The Many Names for Mother

by Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781631013676
Publisher: Kent State University Press
Publication date: 09/03/2019
Series: Wick First Book
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 104
File size: 335 KB

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.

Table of Contents

Foreword Ellen Bass ix

Afraid Ancestral 1

I Drowned

Against Naming 5

For War and Water 7

Other women don't tell you 8

Letter to My Son 9

Other women don't tell you 11

Why Walk When We Can Fly 12

Genesis 14

Wikipedia for "Name" 15

Learning Yiddish 17

II Light

The moon is showing 29

Other women don't tell you 31

Why I Never Wore My Mother's Pearls 32

My Mother as a Failed Sonnet, or Maybe Just a Forest 33

Why do giraffes climb trees? 34

Microsatellites 36

Take an x-ray of the sun, you'll find 37

Mother's 20-Year-Old Mattress 38

In Everything, He Finds the Moon 40

III Animal

Other women don't tell you 43

The Question 45

Jokes Don't Translate Well from Russian 47

The Book of Mothers 49

Other women don't tell you 50

Everyone is terrified for their kids 51

While everything falls apart, imagine how you'll teach your son about death 52

While everything falls apart, imagine how you'll teach your son where he comes from 53

While everything falls apart imagine how you'll teach your son he is an animal too 55

While everything falls apart, imagine how you'll teach your son about love 56

While everything falls apart, imagine how you'll teach your son about guns 59

IV Drowned Animal Of Light

Other women don't tell you 63

Names of Svet 64

Diagnosis: Takotsubo 66

Other women don't tell you 67

And each 68

The mourning customs of elephants 69

Other women don't tell you 71

Those Who Give Birth to Goats 71

V Home Eternal, Rising

There is no name for this 77

Dyadya Voda 79

Other women tell you 80

Bab'e lyeto / &CyrxEa;&CyrxEat;&CyrxEa;&CyrxFl;&CyrxEe; &CyrxEk;&CyrxEe;&CyrxFb;&CyrxEn; / 82

Camp means field 84

Inheritance 86

Acknowledgments 89

Notes 97

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