The Bear Who Ate the Stars by Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach

The perspective in these poems - at once inside and outside the destruction - reflects Dasbach’s background at age six, she moved from Ukraine to the United States as a Jewish refugee. Toward the middle of the chapbook, the poems begin to meditate on Eastern European conflict. The speaker draws on creativity again to treat the darkness of heritage, this time using her imagination to experience destruction rather than escape it. Husband, forget his origin (“Origin,” 12-16) “to live as an unmarried man,” you re-name him German article “the,” then complicate the bach,

Gaelic Caioneach: “handsome, comely,”ĭas. You break apart Kenneth-Das-bach, break apart When this systematic thinking fails, she begins to grasp her situation using her imagination: The speaker’s search for meaning spans several poems and culminates in “Origin,” where she studies various etymologies (those of ‘viscosity,’ ‘blood,’ and ‘cure,’ for example) to better understand her husband’s disease. In subsequent poems, however, as the speaker confronts the blood disease wracking her husband, she struggles to find meaning - let alone beauty - in anything. When a beloved “you” goes deaf, the speaker imagines “ bursting your eardrum, their purple plume / smell, their pulse, falling away from the flower” (3-4). In the opening poem, “The Secret to Remembering,” the speaker identifies beauty in the face (more precisely, the ear) of handicap. The first poems of the chapbook examine the extent to which illness and beauty can coexist. With a sharpness that makes it difficult to believe this a first chapbook, Dasbach succeeds in capturing the confusing beauty of darkness. As it probes illness, destruction, and death with pensive lyricism, The Bear Who Ate the Stars invites readers to puzzle the intricate interconnection of the enchanting and the off-putting.

The fantastical, beautiful image and its tragic referent reflect the connection between beauty and darkness that unifies the chapbook. In “On the Pripyat, 2006,” Dasbach likens the nuclear waste that obscured the sky in the 1986 Chernobyl disaster to a bear “growling so loudly, the entire city woke / to look up, only to find / he’d already eaten the stars” (38-40). Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach’s debut chapbook The Bear Who Ate the Stars (Split Lip Press, 2014) is titled for one of its pause-inspiring images.

The Bear Who Ate the Stars by Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach