Deaf Republic
New York Times Notable Book
Named by BBC “one of 12 artists that changed the world”
Winner of LA Times Book Prize, Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Poetry, National Jewish Book Award.
Finalist for National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Book Award, PEN/Jean Stein Award, Kingsley Tufts Award, Forward Prize (UK), T.S. Eliot Prize (UK).
Named Best Book of the Year by NPR, Washington Post, New York Times Book Review, Times Literary Supplement, Publishers Weekly, Financial Times, The Guardian, Irish Times, Library Journal, The Telegraph, New Statesman, Slate, Vanity Fair, Lithub, Huffington Post, The New York Public Library, The American Library Association.
“Ilya Kaminsky’s long-awaited Deaf Republic is a contemporary epic. Evident throughout is a profound imagination, matched only by the poet’s ability to create a republic of conscience that is ultimately ours, too, and utterly his own—a map of what it means to live in a “peaceful country.””
“In this extraordinary book-length narrative work, re-envisioning disability as power and silence as singing, Kaminsky has created a searing allegory precisely tuned to our times, a stark appeal to our collective conscience.”
“This extraordinary poetry collection is structured as a two act play in which an occupying army kills a deaf boy and villagers respond by marshaling a wall of silence as a source of resistance...These poems bestow the power of sacred drama on a secular martyrology...a superb and vigorous imagination, a poetic talent of rare and beautiful proportions...A visit to this republic will not leave the reader unchanged.”
“Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic is a work of genius and a true work of art.”
“In Kaminsky’s soulful new collection the language is exquisite; the ethical questions Kaminsky poses are provocative.”
“I fell hard for Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic. Part folklore, fable, war story and love poem, it imagines an occupied town falling deaf in response to the shooting of a child. Often devastating, always humane, this is a book of the century, let alone this year.”
“Stunning. . . . At once intimate and sensual but also poignant and timely.”
“Mesmerizing”
“Intoxicating and wondrous. . . . In these sincere, striking poems, Kaminsky posits the beauty of this world as essential.”
“Deaf Republic continues to haunt me. It’s a parable that comes to life and refuses to die.”
“...evocative, satirical, internationally revered. This work was 15 years in the making, a political allegory, a boldly sensual love story”
“I was stunned by Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic, lyric poems presented as a play in two acts, set in a country in crisis, inspired both by Odessa, where Kaminsky grew up, and America, where he now lives. It’s a book about censorship, political apathy, torture — “the nakedness / of the whole nation” — but also about tomato sandwiches, the birth of a daughter and the sudden, almost shocking joys of longtime married life.”
“Extraordinary, haunting”
“Not merely one of the best, most surprising, beautiful, tragic, gripping, and sadly relevant books of the year, but arguably of the entire decade. ”
“If I may, it’s not too soon, or a stretch, to claim that Deaf Republic a 21st century classic.”
“Deaf Republic is amazing: gripping narrative, powerful images, historically relevant. Do yourself a favor and read it.”
“Extraordinary”
“This hybrid work is a testament to the human spirit. The book’s political esprit de corps, its savvy innovation, and visual beauty (rooted in defiant puppetry and hallowing sign language) make Deaf Republic feel like a contemporary classic.”
“How is it that one poet can make the silence visible? How is that one poet can illustrate – and enlighten – our collective deafness? Deaf Republic is a remarkable book of poems from one of the great symphonic voices of our times. A deep bow.”
“Riveting and emotional.”
“A narrative that explores how we think about silence – as rebellion, but also as fearful failure to act: “We lived happily during the war / and when they bombed other people’s houses, we / protested / but not enough”. Kaminsky, who lost most of his hearing at the age of four, left the former Soviet Union as a teenager and was granted asylum in the US; his tale of upheaval in an occupied territory speaks to our current political anxieties. But Deaf Republic imaginatively succeeds through its use of deafness as extended metaphor, when voices clamour and truth becomes “fake news”. Like the townsfolk he writes about, who invent a sign language as a riposte to atrocity and unrest, Kaminsky’s fluid yet fragmented verse drama is a novel response to conflict and miscommunication, hoping for peace rather than “silence, like the bullet that’s missed us”.”
“The product of 15 years of meditation, this chilling work heralds the maturity of an important voice in world poetry.”
“I don’t know why it took me so long to pick up Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic , but it’s tremendous. (You don’t have to take my word for it—just read the very first poem.)”
“Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic is a dramatic masterwork, a parable-in-poems that confronts the darkness of war with the blazing light.”
“Kaminsky’s book bears comparison with other excellent North American imports of recent years: Anne Carson, Claudia Rankine [...] ,Deaf Republic should also compel readers on this side of the Atlantic.”
“Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky might appeal even more. This absorbing, tender, singular book is part drama, part sequence, powerfully and essentially international – Kaminsky is a Russian immigrant to the US – and always at the thrilling boundaries of language.”
“I love Deaf Republic. It’s one of my favorite books of the year. It may be one of my favorite books of all time. ”
“What a book of poems! Both terrifying and beautiful and supremely original. As readers, we don’t know where we are geographically, in what war and what country, while at the same time recognizing that it could be also United States today. The poems grow vaster and vaster in their meaning till they began to haunt me.”
“I read Deaf Republic in one swoop, felled. Ilya Kaminsky’s poems quickened me in a way I returned to, waking, in the middle of the night.”
“I read mostly classics. George Eliot, Evelyn Waugh, Woolf, over and over again. Same with poetry. Dickinson, Frost, Wordsworth, and Yeats. Then again, I did just read Ilya Kaminsky’s 2019 collection, Deaf Republic, and was blown away.”
“Tour-de-force collection of poems”
“If you were to read only one book of poetry in 2019, this should be it.”
“I continue to return to Amiri Baraka’s work to be saved, to Lucille Clifton’s, to June Jordan’s. To Ilya Kaminsky’s work to figure out what it is to love and also continue forth in times of revolution and injustice.”
“...drama that combines themes of political violence, familial love, generation – and the subject of deafness. In some respects sombre, in others joyous, one of its several distinctions is to be properly observant of things-in-themselves, while at the same time being richly metaphoric. It’s a compelling mixture...”
“Brilliant ”
“A theatrics of word and silence Deaf Republic imagines a world which could very well be our own: a town is occupied, a deaf child is murdered, a collectivity forms in resistance. While there is dystopia—a narrative, plotting pace—Ilya Kaminsky nevershies from the possibilities of lyric and collective upheaval. As imaginative as it is insurgent, Deaf Republic testifies to our silence, a silence that, already and still, “stands up for us.””
“What is silence? Something of the sky in us. Deaf Republic is changing my life.”
“It’s an astounding, urgent and fresh creation.”
“Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic was definitely the best collection I encountered. Kaminsky’s poetry manages to be both devastating and incredibly beautiful. It raises huge questions about responsibility, culpability and what it means to be human. ”
“Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic—holy good god, it’s a masterpiece. A true masterpiece.”
“I find I read more poetry in times of difficulty. I don’t necessarily want something that’s uplifting or “comforting.” I look for work that feels like it acknowledges the magnitude of what we’re going through. A favourite poet of mine is Ilya Kaminsky. I love all his work”
“Deaf Republic is nurtured by a commitment to poetry as a form of resistance, dialogue, and a noble spiritual vocation—ethos that hearkens back to poetry’s origins and its power.”
“Powerful. With lyrical and fearless language, Ilya Kaminsky has written an engrossing page-turner”
“It’s ‘we’ in Deaf Republic because we are all victims, victimizers and those who stand around and watch. And yet, there is so much love and lilt of morning.”
“Deaf Republic imagines the moment of resistance after a deaf boy is shot and killed. This form of resistance emerges that is almost not possible in our world, but it’s possible in this one. The town members all take on this kind of “silence” in the face of the aftermath as a way of not engaging with authority. It’s beautiful work around the idea of demonstrating that radical possibility.”
“Deaf Republic demonstrates that Kaminsky’s immense talent. It is a must-read for our turbulent times.”
“Deaf Republic is a contemporary masterpiece. This book is proof that in 2019 great poetry can enjoy tremendous popularity.”
“From this talented poet’s pen, magical phrases. Deaf Republic is a parable about society and the impact of reaction. Kaminsky, who has been mostly deaf since age four, transmutes disability into strength in this new collection. While deftly describing an imaginary place, this book seems to dangle us over the precipice of the here and now. The indomitable spirit of the townspeople—and of the poet Kaminsky—glistens in every line.”
“Ilya Kaminsky’s ability to create such a rich landscape in only 60 lyric poems of a timely and beautiful jeremiad: a devastatingly powerful indictment of complacency”
“Deaf Republic, a fable of love and war [is] set in an imaginary town called Vasenka. Vasenka has an old-world feel yet —like all great poetry— its story speaks urgently to the present.”
“Ilya Kaminsky’s poetry collection Deaf Republic has blown my mind”
“In Kaminsky’s lines, sound takes visible shape. The ordinary things of the world transmogrify, and a small detail, stripped down, takes on the weight of a country.”
“He’s created a profound collection to rattle the frenetic noise of our times.”
“Deaf Republic a stunning and prescient drama, like the best books of Marquez and Kundera. Not many American poets, not many poets anywhere are engaged in this kind of work. I think that Deaf Republic will be a splendid, groundbreaking moment. Reading this book, my overwhelming sense is admiration and pleasure.”
“There is a rich and expert play of form and style so that this sense of shocked ‘convulsion’ never leaves the page.”
“Prescient and incisive.”
“After a soldier kills Petya, a young deaf boy in Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic, the townspeople of Vasenka protest by refusing to hear: “Our hearing doesn’t weaken, but something silent in us strengthens.” This dramatic narrative poem follows the lives of two married puppeteers, Sonya and Alfonso, as well as others, whose resistance unfolds into a searing indictment against authoritarianism. “Ours is a country in which a boy shot by police lies on the pavement for hours.” Echoing Kaminsky’s native Russia and the US where he now lives, Vasenka is a fictional stage where his prophecy is meted out with dark humour, gorgeous language and surprising tenderness.”
“There is hard-earned, luminous simplicity in such paradoxical figures, a simplicity that reminds one that candor is as much about white-hot heat as it is about truth-telling. Perhaps the most profound lines of the book—lines invoking theology, morality, complicity, and free will—are among its simplest: “At the trial of God, we will ask: why did you allow all this? / And the answer will be an echo: why did you allow all this?” One notes that there need not be a god for the answer to come.”
“Ilya Kaminsky’s long-awaited Deaf Republic arrives on the shelf of immediate masterworks. As powerfully filmic as it is verbal, Kaminsky’s originalities of language and story are hewn from bedrock necessities. His people and their fates carry the visionary authority, spareness, objectivity and tenderness of Kafka or Brech or Anna Swir. Deaf Republic’sextended parable speaks directly in the ears, mind, and heart of our own harrowed and harrowing time, signing what is already and always happening.”
“Cutting-edge, sweeping drama”
“I read Deaf Republic with feverish excitement and deepening wonder. There is rage in these pages, urgency and force and also a great, redeeming beauty. Ilya Kaminsky’s lines buzz with a kind of electric freshness; reading them is like laying your hand on the live wire of poetry. He’s the most brilliant poet of his generation, one of the world’s few geniuses.”
“Aggrieved, inconsolable, and yet ecstatic, comic, and indefatigably in love with the world. Deaf Republic is a book of wonders.”
“This book has brought to the poetry world a kind of trembling, manic anticipation. . . Deaf Republic is a masterfully wrought collection.”
“The peculiar achievement of Deaf Republic—echoey with calls and responses, song and clamor—is that the whole is not simply greater than its parts: it is their counterargument, their antidote. Any one page captures a shattered, shuddered utterance [...] No new music is sparser, more letter-perfect, than Kaminsky’s.”
“Deaf Republic is a book of transcendence....[it] will be spoken about for years to come.”
“Deaf Republic does more than engage us as readers—it pulls us into the narrative and demands we see ourselves in Vasenka, as a member of the town with choices to make about how to respond to the power that surrounds us.”
“Deaf Republic is conscience, terror, silence, rage, made to coexist moments of tenderness, piercing beauty, empathic lyricism.”
“In the poetry world, Kaminsky’s second book has been wondered about second-act on par to Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead. Why? The Ukrainian-born Kaminsky is a kind of walking IMDB of poetry, libraries of world’s verse and all their music live inside him. In ‘Deaf Republic,’ Kaminsky truly emerges and it’s a glorious thing to behold.”
“Deaf Republic is a work that may well survive civilization itself. It is a book of small graces, of resistance, of inordinate, unconditional humanity that brought me—I’m not ashamed to admit—to tears. ”
“Kaminsky is and has always been a chronicler of humanity itself, an amplifier of all its music, heard and unheard. With this timely, occasionally terrifying, and perfectly structured book, Kaminsky proves something else: that he is also the clear heir to a magnificent tradition rooted in Odessa, his native city.”
“Sign language is often portrayed as primitive and pantomime-esque, or ridiculed as a “non-language”, but in the pages of Deaf Republic signs become symbols of residence and transformation. It is authoritarian soldiers who speak “the language no one understands.”
“All of Kaminsky’s work does what Wallace Stevens said modern poetry must do: “It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place. / It has to face the men of the time and to meet / The women of the time. It has to think about war / And it has to find what will suffice.” Kaminsky’s latest book, Deaf Republic, thinks deeply about war, opening with one kind of state violence (“And when they bombed other people’s houses, we // protested / but not enough”) and closing with another: “Ours is a country in which a boy shot by police lies on the pavement / for hours.” It finds, painfully and tenderly, what will suffice: the love between a husband and wife (“I am not a poet, Sonya, / I want to live in your hair”); the wonder of sensory experience (“How bright is the sky / as the avenue spins on its axis”). And through its sense-soaked imagery and bold experimentation, it is, to quote Stevens’s last requirement, living.
Kaminsky speaks of our darkest days, of tyranny and death. Yet he sings of the world—of poetry and dance and sex and love—with the highest praise. As he writes in Deaf Republic, “You will find me, God, / like a dumb pigeon’s beak, I am / pecking / every which way at astonishment.”
“Groundbreaking”
“Deaf Republic is a book about war, and I’ve read a lot of books about war, but few as capable of mining that gray space where resistance and cowardice intersect. In Kaminsky’s work there is, amidst the violent oppression of wartime, room for love, lust, self-interest, self-sabotage—room for so much humanness, so much life. ”
“This is political writing at its best–not ideological or hectoring poster board invective but the sound of human anguish–read the poems, weep, and be shaken.”
“Stunning poems”
“There are many things that set this book apart, but none more than the way it refuses to hold the pathos of protest at arm’s length, zooming in on ever proud and shameful facet of the human conscience that, in rare moment of courage, becomes the only thing capable of holding the state at bay. As long as that courage is felt, it is truly dazzling.”
“It is rare to experience such a shock in a lyric. Deaf Republic is a poetic tragedy of great depth. ”
“The exposed nerve of human compassion”
“Stunning achievement.”
“Deaf Republic left me with one of those ethereally haunting feelings (still lingering). It is indeed a ‘fable’ of poetically epic proportions. ”
“Breathtaking”
“Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic is the best book of poems I have read in a long time.”