Finalist for the National Book Award Finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Award Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award Winner of theLos Angeles TimesBook Prize Winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award Winner of the National Jewish Book Award Finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award Finalist for the T. S. Eliot Prize Finalist for the Forward Prize for Best Collection
Ilya Kaminskys astonishing parable in poems asks us, What is silence?
Deaf Republicopens in an occupied country in a time of political unrest. When soldiers breaking up a protest kill a deaf boy, Petya, the gunshot becomes the last thing the citizens hearthey all have gone deaf, and their dissent becomes coordinated by sign language. The story follows the private lives of townspeople encircled by public violence: a newly married couple, Alfonso and Sonya, expecting a child; the brash Momma Galya, instigating the insurgency from her puppet theater; and Galyas girls, heroically teaching signing by day and by night luring soldiers one by one to their deaths behind the curtain. At once a love story, an elegy, and an urgent plea, Ilya Kaminskys long-awaitedDeaf Republicconfronts our times vicious atrocities and our collective silence in the face of them.
Ilya Kaminskywas born in the former Soviet Union. He is the author of a poetry collection,
Dancing in Odessa, and coeditor of
The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry. He was a 2014 finalist for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature.
One of theNew York Times's 100 Notable Books of 2019
These poems bestow the power of sacred drama on a secular martyrology. . . . Kaminsky is wonderfully attentive to . . . repeating patterns of details, contributing to the impression that his book is a through-composed whole, rather than simply a sequence of individual poems. . . . By situating thesel'
![Deaf Republic: Poems [Paperback]](/itemImage/2/3/1/1/2_3397915.jpg "Deaf Republic: Poems [Paperback]")