Watching a war waged in your home country from thousands of miles away is even more complicated when you add being a parent, and on top of that, raising a neurodiverse child.
These themes all collide in the latest poetry collection from Julia Kolchinsky, the Ukrainian-born writer and assistant professor of English at Denison University in Ohio. She tells Ozarks at Large’s Daniel Caruth that the title for that book, Parallax, came from an obsession she believes all poets share: the moon.
Julia Kolchinsky: So I was writing all of these poems in the book that are called Why Write Another Poem About the Moon? And for any writer listening, I mean, if you haven’t written a moon poem, how are you even a writer? I mean, it’s just truly something that we’re so obsessed with because it’s this entity, right, that’s always there but also not always seen. That’s pulling. And I found the moon to be this really powerful metaphor for motherhood and the way motherhood is constantly this thing that is tugging at you whether you see the light or you don’t see the light. This tidal pull.
And, you know, Parallax is a scientific term that I define in the kind of opening page of the book, and it is the apparent shift caused by viewing from two different vantage points. So initially, when we view a celestial object from two different vantage points, we can find out how far away from Earth it is. And I found that particular, you know, lens to be really marvelous for viewing nuero-spiciness and viewing the way I see my son, the world sees my son, my son sees the world. There’s all these different vantage points as a way of trying to quantify, trying to name distance. And ultimately it’s this thing that’s unnameable, unquantifiable, but something that I return to over and over again in my work, this obsessive kind of need to understand and to look with empathy. So it’s a very roundabout way of getting to it, but that’s part of what Parallax comes from.
Daniel Caruth: Yeah. And with so much of the work, it’s about, you know, it’s about you viewing the war in Ukraine from the United States, from this distance, and then also you talking about, you know, your neurodiverse son and talking about viewing that from your perspective as well and seeing other people’s perspective. Can you talk about how you decided to talk about those two things for this collection and why you decided to, I guess, intertwine them rather than speak about one or the other?
Julia Kolchinsky: Yeah. I mean, I think for me as a writer, I’m always composing out of a very engaged kind of present lyric eye. And so it was impossible to talk about one without talking about the other. I’m hearing the news. You know, my poem Watching Masha and the Bear as Russia Invades Ukraine is literally the first day of the missiles falling, and there was an ice storm in Little Rock. And so my kids are home from school, and I have to parent them. But all I can do is listen to the news. And so I’m listening to the news through one earbud and then listening to Masha and the Bear in Russian through the other ear. So you can’t make this stuff up. The poem writes itself, and I can’t separate one from the other.
And that’s kind of how this collection came together, is that I could never separate my present-day experience of parenting, which is, you know, full of these small violences and full of difficulty. That doesn’t, of course, compare to the experience of war, but it does relate to it on an emotional level, if not a very literal, physical, grounded one.
Daniel Caruth: Yeah. Well, you — in that first poem, it was the line, “The world is cruel to most. Just look.” And I think that really sets up the rest of the narrative, talking about that cruelty and the violence and then pairing it with all of these, you know, normal everyday life, mundane moments. Can you talk about how you manage and portray those themes throughout the collection?
Julia Kolchinsky: Well, I think as a poet, for me, I think the poetic sensibility is all about kind of acute attention and awareness to detail. And I think that as we move about the world, if we’re acutely aware and attentive, there are so many moments of both violence and beauty in everyday experience.
And so for me, looking at — in the next poem in the collection, you know, 100 Days After the War, right on the 100 day, looking at the blackening toilet rim that needs to be cleaned instantly, also takes me outside of that domestic space and to an experience of violence, be it generational. In that particular poem, it takes me to kind of a generational experience of violence and my family’s survival of the Holocaust in Ukraine.
But all these moments, I feel like, are kind of palimpsestic in a way — you know, palimpsest, where they used to write on hide, and then there was a limited supply of hide, so you had to paint over it, cover over it, and then you would write the next thing over what was already written. And so when you look at these old texts, it’s a palimpsest — you see layers and layers and layers that have been written.
And I think that’s the way poetry works for me often, is this acute attention to a detail that then uncovers something else, either past or present, you know, or an image. And that’s how all this kind of cruelty can come out of looking at roadkill, looking at the rim of a toilet bowl, brushing my son’s hair.
Daniel Caruth: And I wanted to talk a little bit, too, about, you know, the language that you use throughout the poems, because, I mean, it’s clear that you come from, you know, multilingual background. And, you know, how does that inform your work and inform the words that you use? Maybe if you have access to one language that has more specific words that mean something that you can’t access in this other language, or vice versa. Yeah. Just interested in how that plays out in your writing.
Julia Kolchinsky: So for me, growing up as a native Russian speaker and growing up hearing poetry read to me aloud, memorizing poetry in Russian, has really informed my music in English. So even as I write in English, there’s a way in which I’m hearing kind of cadences that come from Russian-language poetry.
That’s one thing. And then the other thing is, particularly for this collection, as a Russian speaker, it’s a deep questioning of that language because it’s the language of the oppressor. It’s the language of the colonizer, particularly being from Ukraine — and not even after the full-scale invasion in 2022, but particularly after the annexation of Crimea and the beginning of violence in the Donbas and Donetsk regions in 2014.
A lot of Ukrainians turned exclusively to speaking Ukrainian as a pretty intentional political act. And it’s my inability to do that because I never learned Ukrainian. Russian was the national language. My early childhood was in the former Soviet Union. Ukraine hadn’t even gained her independence yet until 1991, and I left in 1993, the year that Ukrainian became the national language.
And so it’s really grappling with those linguistic and historical complexities and the fact that I’m raising my children to be bilingual and to also be these native speakers of Russian, and particularly the way that that is perceived. Right? We talked about, like, perception of the outside, but the Russian language did in 2022 start being perceived as this very negative thing, both among Americans and among particularly Ukrainians. It became a fraught, across-space language to speak in Russian with dear Ukrainian friends with whom I’d always spoken in Russian. But that became a language of violence.
Daniel Caruth: You say in the collection, “The last thing I want is another poem about war.” And for this festival that you’ll be a part of, you’re doing a talk on witness. And so can you talk a little bit about what you want people to get from this collection and why you felt compelled to share this and to share your feelings about this?
Julia Kolchinsky: I mean, we’ve talked about it a little bit, but thank you for that question and pulling out that quote in particular. So I actually was just in Lexington, Virginia, doing a talk about witness, and then the poet who I was with, Jaswinder Bolina, was doing a talk also about writing about atrocity but from a very different vantage point.
So my vantage point was asking the students — and it will be at this workshop — to actually look at their atrocity. And his vantage point was to write about the mundane and not look at the atrocity. And I think we both talked about how these are two not opposing perspectives. They’re perspectives that are both necessary in order to bear witness and in order to survive, right? Sometimes what we are called to do is to actually look at the violence and write about it directly. Sometimes we are called to write about the toilet bowl and not focus on the violence, or, you know, to look at the fact that the leaves are turning and that autumn is coming, you know, and it’s that guilt of holding a sense of beauty and a sense of joy while we know that the violence is happening. And these two things are simultaneously occurring.
That’s really what I want from the collection, is one, to show that as much as I don’t want another poem about war, we still need these poems about and not about war because it’s happening whether we write it or not. And I do believe that writing it, that poetry does have an effect. You know, it does show someone something they hadn’t seen. It does make them feel something they haven’t felt. And most importantly, it allows for empathy. It allows for connection. And so that’s what I’m going to be talking about in this workshop. And it’s going to be — we’re going to do both. We’re going to look directly at the violence, and then we’re going to look at the mundane and at the beautiful, in spite of or maybe even more because the violence is happening. We still need to acknowledge and look for beauty and look for joy.
Daniel Caruth: Yeah. Well, going back to the beginning of our conversation, you have prepared a poem to read from the collection for us, and it’s the one where the title Parallax comes from. Is that right?
Julia Kolchinsky: Of course, of course. And a funny little story about that poem is when the book came out, my son was really excited, and he wanted to start reading the poems. And I often get the question of, well, how do you think he’ll feel, you know, knowing that you’re writing all this stuff about him? And I know how he feels. He loves it. He’s so excited to be in all these pages. But — so he turned and read this poem, and he had two takeaways. First he said, “Mama, well, at least now I know your poems aren’t boring,” which there’s, like, no better praise, right? From a nine-year-old, it’s mic drop, done. But then he started correcting it. He was like, “I remember that time, and I did not say stardust, stardust. I only said it once.” Now my worry, right, isn’t his concern about how he’ll be portrayed, but he’s a fact-checker.
Daniel Caruth: You’ve got an editor now.
Julia Kolchinsky: I do, I do. He’s, he’s going to — really, things are going to come out in journals, and he’s going to be like, “Uh, send them a retraction.”
Poem reading: Parallax
Julia Kolchinsky’s book Parallax is out now from the University of Arkansas Press. She spoke with Ozarks at Large’s Daniel Caruth over the phone last week. She will be hosting a reading and workshop as part of the Bee Balm Poetry Week this weekend.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline. Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
