My deepest thanks to the editors of the following journals where these poems first appeared. Without your encouragement and belief in my words, this book would not be possible.
32 Poems: “In Everything, He Finds the Moon”
Academy of American Poetry: “Letter to My Son” and “For War and Water” (reprint)
The Account: “While everything falls apart, imagine how you’ll teach your son about death,” and “My Mother as a Failed Sonnet, or Maybe Just a Forest”
The Adroit Journal: “Why I Never Wore My Mother’s Pearls”
American Poetry Review: “Other women don’t tell you [mother is born],” “Other women don’t tell you [what your mother will say],” and “Other women don’t tell you [it’s a battle]”
Beloit Poetry Journal: “Camp means field” and “There is no name for this.”
Best New Poets 2017: “Against Naming” (reprint)
BOAAT: “Wikipedia for ‘Name’”
Boxcar Poetry Review: “While everything falls apart, imagine how you’ll teach your son where he comes from”
Cherry Tree: “bab’e lyeto / бабье лето /”
CLEAVER Magazine: “Dyadya Voda”
Contrary: “Why do giraffes climb trees?”
DIALOGIST: “Diagnosis: Takotsubo” and “Other women don’t tell you [some days]”
Four Way Review: “Other women don’t tell you [you will forget]” and “Microsatellites”
The Greensboro Review: “The Book of Mothers”
Guernica Magazine: “Names of Svet” published as “Stories of Svet”
Half-Mystic: “While everything falls apart, imagine how you’ll teach your son about love”
The Missouri Review Online: “The Question”
Midway Journal: “Genesis,” “Those Who Give Birth to Goats” and “the mourning customs of elephants”
Muse/A Journal: “Other women tell you”
Muzzle: “Other women don’t tell you [about the hair]”
Narrative Magazine: “Learning Yiddish”
New South: “Against Naming”
Poetry Daily: “Other women don’t tell you [what your mother will say]” (reprint)
Poetry International: “For War and Water”
Poetry Northwest: “Take an x-ray of the sun, you’ll find” and “Other women don’t tell you [the next day]”
Poets Reading the News: “While everything falls apart, imagine how you’ll teach your son about guns” and “Everyone is terrified for their kids”
Sixth Finch: “Jokes Don’t Translate Well from Russian”
SWWIM Every Day: “Why Walk When We Can Fly”
TriQuarterly: “While everything falls apart, imagine how you’ll teach your son he is an animal too”
Vinyl Poetry: “and each” and “Other women don’t tell you [it will always be your fault]”
Waxwing: “The moon is showing” and “Mother’s 20-year-old Mattress”
I feel immeasurably overwhelmed with gratitude to so many people, I must first apologize to anyone I inadvertently forget to acknowledge by name. Know that if you are reading this, I am grateful to you, for holding this dream in your hands, for being part of making it a material reality.
Immense gratitude to the poets who read this collection with care and wrote the blurbs crowning the back cover. To Traci Brimhall, for writing openly, and with gorgeous rigor, about the experience of motherhood and then reading my poems with such deep empathy. To Linda Gregerson, for being an unforgettable workshop instructor at Bread Loaf while I was pregnant with my son, well before most of this book’s poems existed, and then reading into their histories with a profound embrace of its complexities and ambiguities. To Ilya Kaminsky, my role model for writing in English, our adopted mother’s tongue, while still reaching back to the music of Russian poets and our pasts in Ukraine, from where our families emigrated the same year, thank you for devouring my book with such fervor and being attentive to the crafting of its individual poems.
To Ellen Bass, not only for truly seeing the vision of this book and selecting it for publication, but for reading its poems with a care and attention I never could have imagined or hoped for. Our two-hour phone call about your suggested revisions will be one I keep looking back on and learning from for years and books to come.
Thank you to all the dedicated people at the Wick Poetry Center and Kent State University Press, for believing in this book and bringing it into the world: Christine Brooks, Richard Fugini, Jessica Jewell, Györgyi Mihályi-Jewell, Susan Wadsworth-Booth, and Mary D. Young. A special thanks to David Hassler, for taking the time to read even more of my poems and provide invaluable feedback on their place in the manuscript, and also for making the excited phone call that changed my life.
With great appreciation for the following institutions who have supported the making of this book throughout its various stages: The University of Maryland, The University of Oregon, The University of Pennsylvania, The Yiddish Book Center’s Tent: Creative Writing Conference, The United States Holocaust Museum and Memorial (USHMM), The Auschwitz Jewish Center, The Hadassah–Brandeis Institute’s Ruth G. Newman Research Award, and The Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference.
To all the wonderful baristas at Ultimo Coffee on 22nd and Catherine—where most of this manuscript was composed—thank you for fueling my writing with the best extra hot lattes.
Gratitude to my many multidisciplinary mentors in the field of Holocaust studies, from fellow writers to researchers: Al Filreis, Annette Finley-Croswhite, Judith Greenberg, Elana Jankel, Courtney Sender, and Anika Walke.
My unending thanks to the creative writing teachers and mentors throughout my life: Ms. Finn, now Mrs. Sharyn Finn Bergman, who introduced me to expressing myself in English through poetry in the third grade; Donald Berger and Michael Collier, whose poetry workshops at the University of Maryland taught me how to tear my poems apart, so I could piece them back together stronger; and to Michael, for continuing to support my work for years after being your student. To my MFA professors at the University of Oregon: Geri Doran, for being the most attentive reader and thesis advisor, and always pushing my poems to discover their most brutal truths, you have been a guiding lyric voice; and Garrett Hongo, for teaching me what it means to listen to the music of the past and bring it into the present, for encouraging my obsession with telling and retelling that which refused to be told, and most of all, for reading an earlier draft of this book and suggesting I put the traumatic past in conversation with the sensual present of motherhood; without this advice, the arch of this book would not have emerged. To Anya Krugovoy Silver, taken from us too soon, I wish I could have told you that your poems, and your belief in mine, have changed my life, encouraging me to keep going when I’d lost hope because your magic was to always have faith. I will keep reading your words and writing with you and listening to your voice, of strength and history and motherhood. Thank you, eternally.
To my devoted advisors at the University of Pennsylvania, Kevin M. F. Platt and Paul Saint-Amour, thank you for supporting my blend of scholarship and creative writing, for believing in my ability to manage it all while mothering, and understanding that family always comes first. Kevin, you have opened my poetry even more to the Russian literary and cultural history from which it rises. Paul, you have taught me to listen even closer to language, and I know this strengthened my writing. You always reminded me to give myself credit for the efforts that might go unseen, thank you for seeing me so clearly, for helping me to see myself this way too. Thanks to the many other Penn faculty who have influenced me as a poet and scholar: David Eng, Kathryn Hellerstein, Jo Park, and Liliane Weissberg. And thanks to my doctoral peers, who helped me balance the poet and academic life, supporting my pursuit of both: Tim Chandler, Alison Howard, Pavel Khazanov, Alex Moshkin, Ariel Resnikoff, Iuliia Skubytska, and Orchid Tierney.
To the poets I am lucky enough to call friends, who have been there as readers throughout the writing and rewriting of this manuscript during the five years it took to become a book. Thank you for your eyes and ears, my UO MFA peers and the poets I’ve met at workshops since: Tina Mozelle Braziel, Chen Chen, Luke Hollis, Cate Lycurgus, Jenna Lynch, sam sax, and Carl Swart. My dear Sam Herschel Wein, thank you for your responses to frantic emails of draft poems, your honest feedback, and most of all, for your constant positivity and infectious spirit. Thank you to my poetry-soul-sister, Kelly Grace Thomas, for all of our poem and soul exchanges, for believing so fiercely in me and this book. Gratitude to Katie Condon and Flower Conroy, who graciously read earlier drafts of the manuscript in its entirety and helped it reach its final form. Thank you to my fellow Philly poet, Steven Kleinman, my partner in coffee-shop-writing crime, not only for providing essential line-edits, revision suggestions, and motivation to keep writing, but also for being there to listen to me complain about the long process of submission and rejection. Thank you, Ross White, for our Grinds where so many of these poems emerged or found their final forms, and for the inspiring way you champion emerging poets, the way you believe in our voices even when we stop believing in them ourselves. Thank you to my fellow Mama-poets who understand how motherhood seeps into not only the subject matter of our work, but the very craft of writing, Sara Rebeka Burnett, Maya Jewell Zeller, and Alexis Zimberg. Thank you all for encouraging me to keep writing and submitting in the face of any rejection, you’ve all helped make this book possible.
To my all my Fit4Mom Philly Mamas, but especially Kelsey Rose Clark, Anna Demetriou, Kim Martin Freidman, Sarah Mayland, Sara McDonald, Sara Strehle Meccia, and Sara Brohawn Rivas, thank you for your honest motherhood. It has helped motivate the writing of “Other women don’t tell you” poems and the blog that followed.
To Stephanie Ruiz Dasbach, thank you for being the sister I never had and the Momma with whom I can share my worries and feelings of inadequacy at all hours, learning from the way you’ve dedicated yourself to raising four incredible children without losing sight of who you are.
To Gina Belopolskaya, my dearest best-friend-Mama, I am in awe of your strength, selflessness, and kindness. Thank you for all you’ve taught me about raising strong-willed boys while challenging the confines of our cultural upbringing, lessons that echo between the lines of these poems.
To Anna Belopolskaya, I am beyond grateful for your tireless work on designing a gorgeous cover that brought my vision to life in ways I couldn’t have imagined, but even more grateful for the decades of best-friendship I’ve been lucky enough to share with you.
To my husband, the Papa-Honey who made me a Mama, my love, I could write you infinite words of gratitude, but language to express this would always fall short. This book exists because of your undying faith in me. Because you refused to let me give up on poetry when my doubts would weigh heavier than my passion. Because you listen to every draft, immerse yourself in the world of my poems, and remind me that others should get to hear them. Because you support and understand the time away from family writing requires, taking care of our son whenever I have a reading or need to escape into my words, and you do so with nothing but compassion, never letting me feel guilty for my work. Thank you for making me feel loved and appreciated every day, for being the most devoted father, and for becoming a doting son and grandson to my Mamachka and Babushka.
To my Mamachka and Babushka and Pra-Babushka, the mothers I come from who inspired this book, thank you and Papa and Dedushka, for being brave enough to leave your homeland, to give up everything, so I could grow up in a place where I am free to express myself through writing. My Pra-Babuhska, great-grandmother Vera, your legacy lingers in every poem. Thank you for teaching me history and struggle, strength and resilience. Thank you for your love, which I remember each time I say my son’s name. My Babushka, grandmother Rita, you are the spine of this book, the one who binds these poems and our family. Thank you for your wisdom and the stories you’ve shared so I could imagine a past I never knew. I appreciate how you read my poems in a language that will always remain foreign to you, and without understanding every word, thank you for feeling the emotions I try to convey. To my Mamachka, Svetlana, thank you for raising me on poetry and art and music, for always believing in the power of verse and showing me what it can do. Thank you for teaching me what it means to be a Mama and for supporting my journey of motherhood even when it diverged with yours. Everything I have ever accomplished, or could hope to in the future, is because of who you raised me to be, because of how special you have made me feel every day of my life. When I see myself through your eyes, anything seems possible, like this very book. Thank you, my three pillars of motherhood, Vera, Rita, and Svetlana. Thank you for being the most committed Mamas who always put their children first. I am honored to follow in your footsteps as I balance art and family, striving to be a fraction of the mother you have all been, but comforted by the knowledge that my son is lucky enough to know and be loved by his Babushka and Pra-Babushka.
And to my son, Valen, my Val’ushka, my love who named me Mama, this book is because of you, it is for you. Its poems are the first of what I know will be many attempts to show you where we come. May our history teach you to love in the face of hate, create in the face of destruction, and hope—always hope—in the face of everything else.