40 Weeks Paperback – April 25, 2023 by Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach (Author)
$18.00

40 Weeks

Brand: YesYes Books
Current Stock:
UPC: 9781936919932
Gift Wrapping: Gift Wrapping Available
Authors: Julia Dasbach
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  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ YesYes Books (April 25, 2023)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 110 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1936919931
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1936919932

40 WEEKS, the newest collection from Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach, navigates the world through a poet-mother's sensibilities. She captures stories and lyric moments around and within the speaker's body, made more urgent by the caught voices and presence of her older child. The poems embrace the bare and grotesque nature of pregnancy and childbirth as they consider how to mother a neurodivergent child while pregnant with another, rejecting a culture that views the body with shame. The collection asks how to care for one's own body while caring for so many other bodies and how to connect the identities of mother and writer so one strengthens the other.

Review

40 WEEKS is a breathtaking collection poised on the thresholds between anxiety & wonder, violence & hope, survival & surrender. With fierce intelligence, these poems gallop toward an understanding of just how thin those thresholds are.

-Chelsea Dingman, I, Divided

 

One might think these intimate and tender poems are about carrying a child to term, but in truth they're an examination of what it means to carry ourselves through the world: open, vulnerable, aware of the risk but ready to receive it all.

- Keetje Kuipers, All Its Charms

 

Loving but unsentimental, attentive to both the revelatory details of body, soul and family and to the wider, catastrophically changing world around them, 40 WEEKS gives language and voice to a transformative aspect of human experience.

- Joy Ladin, The Book of Anna

 

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach documents the bizarre journey that is pregnancy at the end of the world. 40 WEEKS is full of wonder at the "blooming: red in milk-water: mango skin" that insists on becoming in spite of history, of chaos, of the "mostly flecks and darkness" that comprise our galaxy. These poems are testament to the sacredness of pushing life forward anyway.

- Irène Mathieu, Milk Tongue

About the Author

JULIA KOLCHINSKY DASBACH is the author of three poetry collections: 40 WEEKS (YesYes Books, 2023), Don't Touch the Bones (Lost Horse Press, 2020), winner of the 2019 Idaho Poetry Prize, and The Many Names for Mother, winner the Wick Poetry Prize (Kent State University Press, 2019) and finalist for the Jewish Book Award. She is currently working on a poetry collection as well as a book of linked lyric essays, both of which grapple with raising a neurodiverse child with a disabled partner under the shadow of the war in Ukraine, Julia's birthplace. Her poems have appeared in POETRY, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, The Nation, and AGNI, among others. Julia holds an M.F.A. in Poetry from the University of Oregon and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory from the University of Pennsylvania. She is an Assistant Professor of English/Creative Writing at Denison University.