Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach, 40 Weeks

 

Nature must be a mother

to pour : thunder : punch

through potholes : hoping this

will make something : anything

: grow : she must be moths : mouth

wide : wings panting for lightning :

who else would strike herself : flame

veining the air? who else would bear

children to rise in spring : only to feel them

cut months later? the moth’s

charred outline on a log : the double

wound : her children’s head sinking

: left to dry on another mother’s

windowsill : who else would ask

for such a violence?

Granville, Ohio-based poet Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach’s third full-length poetry title, following The Many Names for Mother (Kent State University Press, 2019) and Don’t Touch the Bones (Lost Horse Press, 2020), is 40 Weeks (Portland OR: YesYes Books, 2023), a book-length poem on pregnancy and the difficulties of waiting, wanting, catching and becoming. 40 Weeks follows pregnancy, a loss, and a further pregnancy, offering her poem-titles as individual and consecutive weeks, each named and sized after a corresponding vegetable-to-fetus size, from “Week 4: Poppy Seed” and “Week 9: Grape” to “Week 14: Lemon” and “Week 28: Eggplant.” Across this book-length suite, Dasbach composes a mapping of an intimate space, and the emotional and physical complexities and interruptions of everything that pregnancy, mothering and motherhood involves and surrounds. She writes violence and loss, swirls of surrender and survival. As the short single-sentence of the poem “Week 21: Carrot” ends: “into the street with your sun / still inside his laughter / brought icicles down / from a neighbor’s gutter / they shattered / irreparable / far from his body / unprotected and wholly / outside of you / inside / her fingerprints / became / permanent [.]”

Set in a sequence of weeks, Dasbach articulates poems about and around pregnancy and motherhood that ripple out into poems about how precarious and wonderful it is to live, and live deeply, allowing every part of her to surrender to an experience that overtakes every cell. “Four times they drew,” she offers, to open “Week 31: Coconut,” “checking blood / for sweetness—how quickly / the body can dissolve / what feeds it.” There is such a delicate precision to these poems, simultaneously hard-set and tender, as Dasbach composes poems of becoming and becoming more; of being and the slow difficulty and clear beauty of pregnancy and motherhood, along with all the confusion, insecurity, heartbreak and all else that can’t help but come. “You’ve been leaking / for weeks now,” the poem “Week 38: Leek” begins, “secreting, sieving, / seeping, sweating even / in the absence / of heat. You’ve been / leaving yourself / on every fabric, / spending more time / surrounded / by water / so what escapes / comes home.” Dasbach’s 40 Weeks really is a breathtaking collection of documented moments in set lyric, even through the rush of attempting to document each moment as it occurs, before it moves on to the next, and remains in no other form but through memory, or here.

Kelly Grace Thomas, Boat Burned

Bay Area, California poet Kelly Grace Thomas’ full-length poetry debut is Boat Burned (Portland OR: YesYes Books, 2020) a collection of lyric, first-person poems that play off, from the offset, a quote by Sun Tzu (which is also included as epigraph): “When your army has crossed the border, you should burn your boats…” For Thomas, the borders of which she refers are that of the body, and female agency, as her poems examine her physical and emotional self against trauma, toxic cultural expectations and body dysphoria. The poems in Boat Burned move through family and first-person experiences of trauma, violence and loss, and family relationships to that of the body, writing direct or slant or even redacted. In a recent interview conducted by Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach, posted at [Pank], Thomas responds:

I come to the page to break the silence. Of course, there is always the hope that healing will occur but more than anything I think I need to talk about what’s hurting.  Poetry offers companionship and comfort that most other things do not, it takes you into a room of your own and holds your hand until what needs to pass passes. Or processes.

Most of my life, every experience I’ve had has an aftertaste of loneliness, even during the happiest times, surrounded by so many friends and family, there is still this feeling of isolation. The only way to fight it is through connection: to others, to myself, to nature. Poetry gifts me that, it builds a bridge.

Women’s bodies are a paradox of pleasure and punishment. Women are lusted after for their curves, breasts, even compassion; but when it comes to anything from menstruation to miscarriage there is this echoing silence, often cloaked shame. This past summer, I was granted a fellowship for the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, while there I was sitting with a group of women writers this topic came up. I asked them how they learned about their bodies.

Silence.

Not one of them could point to someone who had tried to teach them how to know their body or more importantly how to love their body.

This past year my husband and I have been dealing with infertility issues. I have never experienced something so painful in my life. To try and process I looked into counseling and support groups, but there isn’t much out there. Yet another issue about a woman’s body that is seldom discussed.

Poetry works against the silence, to grant permission, offers companionship, and talk about all these hard and lonely things: my father leaving, my family’s bankruptcy and foreclosures, another negative pregnancy test. I make a deal with myself:  get the grief out, write the poem, put it into the world. Poetry helps me be brave. It is the easiest way for me to approach my darkness and my joy.

Thomas utilizes the lyric to write out the body in a clear language very different, say, than a writer such as Toronto poet Margaret Christakos’ work, which is far more physical and language-based. Thomas explores the body through exposition and narrative, writing out her physical distances and discoveries, such as the opening poem, “VESSELED,” begins:

Here’s how it happened:

I burned each boat

but first they flamed

me. I knew what I was:

a vessel he could float

Inside. He boarded me.

I burned. He hammered

my hips. Violence: a type of marriage.

Maybe I wanted to be owned.

I won’t tell you

about the anchor.

How it rusts

like a fist. He became

my gravity. If I am not boat

then what?

In another life, I stood

treetall. Growled at every axe.

It started when Noah

made an ark of me.