Parallax - Paperback

by Julia Kolchinsky (Author)

Finalist, 2025 Miller Williams Poetry Prize

Julia Kolchinsky's Parallax offers a lyrical narrative of parenting a neurodiverse child under the shadow of the ongoing war in Ukraine, the poet's birthplace. As her child expresses a fascination with death and violence, Kolchinsky struggles to process the war unfolding far away, on the same soil where so many of her ancestors perished during the Holocaust.

Anchored by a series of poems that look to the moon, this collection explores displaced perspectives and turns to the celestial to offer meditations on how elements formed in distant stars account for so much of our human DNA. In these poems, writes series editor Patricia Smith, Kolchinsky "clutches at a feeling of home that is both unfamiliar and deeply treasured, longs for all that was left behind, struggles to come to terms with the rampant violence devastating a landscape that still, in so many encouraging and heartbreaking ways, belongs to her."

Author Biography

Julia Kolchinsky (formerly Dasbach) emigrated from Dnipro, Ukraine, when she was six years old. She is the author of three previous poetry collections: The Many Names for Mother, Don't Touch the Bones, and 40 Weeks. Her writing has appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, and American Poetry Review. She is assistant professor of English and creative writing at Denison University.