The Bear Who Ate the Stars Paperback – October 10, 2014

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach's poems burn with illnesses ill-defined but brought to vivid life through the lens of magic realism. Lilacs burst through eardrums. Lungs fill with sawdust and cedar. Bruises are not bruises but plums. There is pain here, and fear. These are poems about what it is like to live in a body, and what it is like to love another whose body could fail at any moment, as easily as the power going out in the middle of a cold night.Dasbach, however, does not falter. In poem after poem, she offers the reader fox-like stratagems for escaping the trap. Medical diagnoses are broken down, syllable by syllable, until only their roots remain. Radiation breaks free from its reactor and chases soldiers and citizens alike across Ukraine, but Dasbach deftly turns this disaster's mutagenic power back on itself, transforming the black plums of Chernobyl into the titular ursine monster. Her chapbook braces the reader like a bleak fairy tale, asking us to "recall the worry: would he find his way / or fall, body glowing against the dark / like that child who fell out of the sky but / never came home again?"Her poems speak powerfully of connections to beloved people and places, and so it's fitting that she so readily harnesses the connecting magic of hyphens: "Bone-heavy," "sleep-water," "skin-prayer," "hip-fire," the Siberian "winter day-nights" that illustrate how extreme conditions can crush words together despite vast distances of meaning. Dasbach herself has traveled great distances as a Jewish refugee, and her poetry contains backward glimpses, both haunting and beautiful, of her childhood in Ukraine. What is so masterful about The Bear Who Ate The Stars is how the past and the present so easily breathe the same air.Michael YoungRust + Moth

Unique. Inspired. Insightful. Very well written. Julia is a force. A great read.

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach's poems are wonderful, piercing, dazzling. They contain magical depictions of distant realities, yet somehow each poem feels like it happened to you. Julia is an amazing author blessed with vibrancy, imagination, and a true ability to share her feelings, while seemingly capturing the reader's own. People will be singing her praises for a long time to come!