Don’t Touch the Bones, this remarkable second collection by Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach, shows its author hard at work to transform the experience of cultural losses—of lands, language, and legacy—into a poetry of remembrance, homage, and power. She inherited generations of memories and found an uncommon resolve to record the emotional life of her people, Jews only recently emigrated from Ukraine. Though she might be seen as a documentarian of loss, her voice is not hectoring but elegiac, bringing a ferocious lyricism to what might otherwise be the repressed micro-histories, lost narratives of exile, and heirlooms of desperation and diaspora. Her poems rake the oracle bones of her family’s flight from persecution, reading in their fissures a dialogic language both of sorrow and determination.
—Garrett Hongo, author of Coral Road
About the Author
Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach
Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach emigrated from Ukraine as a Jewish refugee when she was six years old. She is the author of The Many Names for Mother (Kent State University Press, 2019), winner of the 2018 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize, and the chapbook, The Bear Who Ate the Stars (Split Lip Press, 2014). Her third collection, 40 WEEKS, written while pregnant with her daughter, is forthcoming from YesYes Books in 2021. Her poems appear in POETRY, American Poetry Review, and The Nation, among others. Julia is the editor of Construction Magazine. She holds an MFA from the University of Oregon and is completing her Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania. She lives in Philly with her two children, two cats, one dog, and one husband.
Awards
REVIEW
CULTURAL WEEKLY
September 23, 2020 in Poetry, Spotlight
by Alexandra Umlas
I am having a difficult time finding words to describe my experience reading Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach’s latest collection of poems, Don’t Touch the Bones, which won the Idaho Prize for Poetry (2019). The collection is deeply touching. It remembers while it forgets. It wails while it sings. It is both wonderfully clear and deeply compressed. It defies words.
And yet, it is made of them. Words are funny like that. Sometimes they render us speechless. Sometimes they call us to action. Consider Dasbach’s title, Don’t Touch the Bones, and remember how you felt as a child when you were told not to touch something. The first poem, “Take a piece of earth,” in the first section of Dasbach’s book, “In the Earth” states, “Show me a place / not made of bone / & see the generations / we have swallowed” (5). The very thing we cannot touch is everywhere; we must not touch it, and even so, we are compelled to touch it by being told not to.
Dasbach, who was six years old when she immigrated to the United States from Ukraine as a Jewish refugee, sets the book into six sections, beginning with “In the Earth,” where the bones reside. In “Out of Stone,” the speaker has visited Poland’s Treblinka Memorial Park:
the smell of eggs and herring. so much
stone, I considered bringing a small one back
to my great-grandmother’s grave. but she’d had
enough already. Enough of Eastern Europe.
Enough of weight. of stone. It must all be
Stone made of stones where she is. boulders really. (9)
Remarkably, the poem contains the enduring horror and weight of the Holocaust, while at the same time positioning stone as a token of remembrance, of durability and elemental love. It makes us feel attached to these things in a way that is real and terrifying; however, it also makes us feel how difficult it must be to keep remembering. Difficult, yet infinitely important.
Dasbach asks us to consider not just if or when to remember, but how to remember and whose responsibility it is to remember. The next section, “In the Air,” begins, ironically, with a poem called “In Praise of Forgetting,” and yet just as we touch the bones after being told not to, the section is set on remembrance. In fact, this is where we find Dasbach most in conversation with the Russian poets who have come before her, like Akhmatova and Mandelstam. Dasbach is buoyed by these voices, and the reader gets a sense of the lineage that has been passed down. Dasbach’s history, but also the history of humanity, which we all share.
A gorgeous sonnet sequence takes us from the air “Into the Fire,” the next section of poems, where Dasbach writes about her own son in a breathtaking poem called “Potatoes Don’t Have Much to Do with Light,” which combines Jewish history and teaching with latke eating, fear, ritual, and raising children:
and in the morning, ner shel,
when he is extinguished enough
to stay in his own room, I wake
to find him surrounded in white—
Tylenol, ibuprofen, Band-Aids,
Gauze, the first-aid kit I thought
was out of reach, scattered
across the floor like a harvest
of winter potatoes,
and his swollen belly, aglow
with all our people’s
burning starch. (32)
The poem causes me to remember my own children’s brushes with disaster. Things we thought were out of reach, but were there for the touching all along. These, too, are the bones. Dasbach utilizes the potato to pull the remembering through the poem until suddenly, the potato has everything to do with light. The latke, or potato pancake, fried and eaten during the Jewish celebration of Hanukkah, is another way to remember. Each poem in this section burns on the page, asking us to consider not only what has been done, but also how we hold what has been done in our own memories. What responsibility do we have for remembering? Do we remember enough? Do we remember appropriately?
“How to Survive a Heat Wave in Auschwitz” forces the reader to consider the ironies involved in how we preserve and visit places where atrocities have occurred. The poem has six suggestions, including number 3: “Let crowds gather at the gates & listen / to them push their way inside, “Come on, / it’s Auschwitz! Everybody / wants to get in,” . . . (38).
The fourth section, “In the Water,” brings the reader further into the ideas of ancestry, lineage, and trauma. The speaker in “Translating Grandfather’s Hunger,” seems to want to be able to construct a cohesive narrative about her family’s history, but finds that her grandfather gives her only pieces of information. In section IV of the poem, the grandfather’s and granddaughter’s conversation continues:
You sound more upbeat today.
I downloaded an app that will record all of our conversations. Should I tell him?
Thank you. I just came back from walking.
It’s so _______ out.
The Russian word I used has no translation. Ravishing and gorgeous
And adjectives are too far from truth. (58)
The poem explores age, language, communication, miscommunication, memory, food, and the body. Dasbach’s rendering of this conversation in poetry asks the reader to consider how histories are passed down. What things get put in and what things get left out of writing? Are the things that are put in enough?
The section ends, aptly, with a “Driftwood Pantoum,” a form which also recycles the language of the poem’s lines, reusing them. As the lines are repeated, they take on additional meaning, so that the form furthers the exploration of all of these questions about remembering Dasbach has been asking throughout the book: “Stop closing your eyes, this isn’t your story, / searching for what hold her together. / You can’t let her rest, my mother says. / Stop closing your eyes, this isn’t your story” (64).
The exploration of ideas and questions most often leads to more ideas and questions. Poetry does its best in exploring rather than in knowing. This is why section V is brilliant in its name, “In the Aether.” Aether is that unknowable, unobservable substance that has taken so many forms and been so many things throughout the ages. This section draws attention to the inexplicableness of everything, while at the same time leaving the reader feeling comfort in the fact that others also survive, and sometimes even thrive, despite this feeling of the unknown.
Take for example the titles of the poems in this section: “Against Ritual,” “Ghost Language,” “Olam Ha-Ba,” which is Hebrew for “The world to come,” “For the lost songs,” “If Nameless Fields Could Sing,” and then, finally, we come to an incredibly powerful erasure poem, “Remembrance,” that works with the text of a 2018 Polish law, and transforms it into a space for remembering and, at the same time, shrewdly makes a statement about Poland’s culpability. Poetry itself is a sort of aether, mysterious it its ability to explain or capture the feeling of things that could not otherwise be explained or captured.
In the final section, “In the Body,” we come back to ourselves, but changed. We are once again touching the bones, and not just touching them, but praising them, revering them, remembering now, despite the insistence that they should be left untouched, that they are a part of us: “together / they are everything your hands can hold / and everything your feet may tread on” (“Phalanx Bone Shehecheyanu” 85).
Dasbach uses the words she is given, the histories she has been passed, the legacy she has been granted, and the forms that have asserted themselves around her, to craft a masterpiece. There are very few books that have caused me to sit, in quiet contemplation, speechless, for a long time after I finished them. This is one of those books.
JEWISH BOOK COUNCIL
Review by
Jamie Wendt 13 December 2020
Winner of the Idaho Prize for Poetry 2019, Don’t Touch the Bones by Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach is a stunning collection that explores the poet’s Ukrainian-Jewish heritage.
In the titular poem, “Don’t Touch the Bones,” she says that she keeps “writing the same story” about the fates and deaths of her people, yet her “great-grandfather’s name stays missing” from the narrative. This poem seems tied with her later one, “Translating Grandfather’s Hunger,” in which she interviews her grandfather, urging him to talk about his childhood, but finds it painful asking questions about his life’s sufferings. What results is a conversation about hunger—both her grandfather’s literal hunger, and the poet’s urgent hunger to unearth the history of her ancestors.
The word “bones" repeats many times throughout the collection, with varying connotations, but it is always used in connection to Dasbach’s personal histories. In the poem “Take a Piece of Earth,” she includes an epigraph with a statement by Governor Alexander Rogachuk claiming, “We will not allow the building of anything on bones of people.” This poem concludes: “Show me a place / not made of bone / & see the generations / we have swallowed.”
This idea of “swallowed generations” is echoed across every section of the book, each past generation strongly tying into the experiences of the present and future. Dasbach writes about the bones of her ancestors buried in mass graves during the Holocaust and the unspoken stories of many survivors, all while gazing at her son and beginning to tell him their family’s stories so he may pass them on to future generations. In these poems, she moves rapidly from the light of flames on a stove to the burning of Jewish bodies; from the tragedy at Babi Yar to the kindling of candle flames while reciting Hebrew blessings. This interconnectedness—of fire and bones, of past and present, of trauma and peace—lingers in a haunting way.
Her long, multi-part poem, “Songs of Home,” directly addressing several bygone Russian poets and artists, including Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, and Aleksander Pushkin, explores Dasbasch’s struggle to find her own place within the music and pain of her people's history and collective memory.
The final few poems of the book are love poems for her son. In “Bone Appendix,” she traces his hand “against construction paper . . . teaching him the edges / of his bones.” This tender, striking image emphasizes many of the themes of the collection as a whole—Dasbach teaches her son where his body ends, what separates him from the earth, from their history, and his future.
Jamie Wendt
is the author of the poetry collection Fruit of the Earth, published by Main Street Rag Publishing Company (2018) and winner of the 2019 National Federation of Press Women Book Award. Her poetry has been published in various literary journals and anthologies, including Feminine Rising: Voices of Power and Invisibility, Lilith, Raleigh Review, Minerva Rising, Third Wednesday, and Saranac Review. Her essays and book reviews have been published in Green Mountains Review, Forward, Literary Mama, and others. She holds an MFA from the University of Nebraska Omaha. She teaches high school English and lives in Chicago with her husband and two children.Ruins of Pompeii, or Ancestry
Not whole, the way we know them now, but fragmentary
hollow skeletals that seal the human or reveal
what it once was. Breath stolen by volcanic gas
and corpses dressed in ashes. An imprint of dust
upon the body, or the body onto dust. Excavators filled
the distance between bone and absent skin with plaster,
made flesh-form evident: a naked relic for collection and display.
My grandfather has never been there, but I showed him
pictures of the ageless forms, coiled snails within
a man-made shell: mother and child cinched at the neck
by soot and centuries and history’s pressure turning
them diamond. Did he wish then that his mother too
had been cast in immortal ash, or was he grateful
gas chambers, mass graves, and crematoriums left nothing
to reconstruct the body by?
—Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach