Julia Kolchinsky, whose collection Parallax was a finalist for the 2025 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, is today’s featured poet at The Missouri Review with her poem “How many poems can I write about my son’s insatiable longing?”
“In some sense,” writes Kolchinsky, “this is a poem that teaches me how much we all make sense of the world through touch, through reaching for the bodies of others, learning how to ask permission and how to give consent. Writing this was a reminder of the way we are all bound to our bodies and the way we seek to break out of them, but with neurodiversity, that innate urge, human in all of us, is that much stronger and that much more unpredictable, that much harder to contain.”
Parallax is a lyric account of parenting a neurodiverse child under the shadow of the war in Ukraine, the author’s birthplace. As the child expresses his own fascination with death, violence, and the grotesque, the poet’s struggles with parenting overlap with processing the present-day war on the same black soil on which many of her ancestors perished during the Holocaust. Kolchinsky is the author of three previous poetry collection—The Many Names for Mother, Don’t Touch the Bones, and 40 WEEKS. Her poetry has appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, and American Poetry Review. She is assistant professor of English and creative writing at Denison University in Ohio.
Parallax will be published in March 2025.