“Book Descriptions: 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.
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” DRIVE
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