40 Weeks

Author: Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach

Publisher: YesYes Books (2023)

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.

"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