Don’t Touch the Bones

Don’t Touch the Bones, this remarkable second collection by Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach, shows its author hard at work to transform the experience of cultural losses—of lands, language, and legacy—into a poetry of remembrance, homage, and power. She inherited generations of memories and found an uncommon resolve to record the emotional life of her people, Jews only recently emigrated from Ukraine. Though she might be seen as a documentarian of loss, her voice is not hectoring but elegiac, bringing a ferocious lyricism to what might otherwise be the repressed micro-histories, lost narratives of exile, and heirlooms of desperation and diaspora.

Her poems rake the oracle bones of her family’s flight from persecution, reading in their fissures a dialogic language both of sorrow and determination. —Garrett Hongo, author of Coral Road