Poem of the Week | June 29, 2015
Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach: "The Question"
This week we offer a new poem by Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach. Dasbach emigrated as a Jewish refugee from Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine in 1993. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Oregon and is currently working on her Ph.D. in the University of Pennsylvania’s Comparative Literature program. Her research focuses on the lyric rendering of trauma in contemporary American poetry composed by emigrants of the former Soviet Union. Her poetry has appeared in Gulf Coast, TriQuarterly, Southern Humanities Review and Guernica, among others journals. She is the author of The Bear Who Ate the Stars (Split Lip Press, 2014), winner of Split Lip Magazine‘s Uppercut Chapbook Award. Julia is also the Editor-in-Chief of Construction Magazine.
Author’s note:
When asked, “Where are you from,” I had always taken great pleasure in detailing my not-born-in-America, immigrant identity. I never questioned the fascination and surprise that resulted from “my” story. However, a few years back, on a family vacation, I witnessed my parents’ and grandparents’ reactions to these same seemingly naive questions of origin—how they were turned from subjects to object through interrogation. “The Question,” arose from this experience. I tried writing the poem from many different points of view—the child’s, the father’s, the grandparent’s, the customs agent’s—but only through the voice of “my mother” did I finally begin to understand the weight of the story I’d been casually telling.
The Question
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