Ilya Kaminsky

Finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry Ilya Kaminsky’s astonishing parable in poems asks us, What is silence? Deaf Republic opens 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 hear—they 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 Galya’s 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 Kaminsky’s long-awaited Deaf Republic confronts our time’s vicious atrocities and our collective silence in the face of them.

Poems

Deaf Republic

Lindsay

You are alive, I whisper to myself, therefore something in you listens.

Our hearing doesn’t weaken, but something silent in us strengthens.

It has begun: I see the blue canary of my country

pick breadcrumbs from each citizen’s eyes—

pick breadcrumbs from my neighbors’ hair—

-"While the Child Sleeps, Sonya Undresses"

of a woman who speaks against silence, knowing

The arrested are made to walk with their arms raised up. As if they are about to leave the earth and are trying out the wind.

and pretend to Sonya that I am the greatest poet

-"The Townspeople Watch Them Take Alfonso"

and no one stands up. Our silence stands up for us.

We must speak not only of great devastation—

Deaf Republic quotes

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