Parallax [Paperback]

Finalist, 2025 Miller Williams Poetry Prize

Julia Kolchinsky’sParallaxoffers 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.”

“Strong voices live in this book—as near as the poet’s son, and as far as her homeland, Ukraine, currently in the midst of horrific war—and yet somehow so much wonder is delivered via Kolchinsky’s line breaks and metaphors, so much love is given by what is said, and what is withheld, as is proper for a lyric poet. In the end, this is most of all a book about being a mother, which is to say, it’s about the universe.”
—Ilya Kaminsky, author ofDeaf RepublicandDancing in Odessa“In these exquisite poems, Kolchinsky writes about a world in tumult, imagining the alchemy that may possibly create gold or that may cause what is known to combust. Meanwhile in deft, loving, and elegant gestures, poems about the stakes that are closest to us flit in adoring musical lines. Even though the world may seem like it is splitting apart, the insistence and love of these poems are enough to stitch what matters together.l³j