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DON’T TOUCH THE BONES

DON’T TOUCH THE BONES

$18.00Price

ISBN: 978-1-7333400-2-1

Pub Date: Mar. 2020

Pages: 100


By Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach


WINNER OF THE IDAHO PRIZE FOR POETRY 2019


Rich in detail, Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach’s Don’t Touch the Bones is a compelling collection that examines the pain of the world’s, a nation’s, and a family’s history.


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

    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.

    —Alexandra Umlas, Cultural Weekly


    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.

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