“What a glory Musica Humana is, all the depths and outer reaches of a human heart sung and spoken into visible existence. It is a book I wish I’d written, full of weeping and laughing and clapping and howling. It reaches far back into collective human imagination and charges our present moment with a great sense of destiny. I will read it again and again.”

“Ilya Kaminsky is dizzying in the way it extols poetry’s promise and heft.”

“Kaminsky writes with a subtleness and depth that few modern poets ever fully realize. Enchanting.”

“Ilya Kaminsky writes in a language from which he is double estranged, chasing an essential and ungraspable music: “in a language not mine, [I} speak of music that wakes us, music / in which we move. For whatever I say // is a kind of petition”…a remarkable debut, one that affords a rare and exhilarating pleasure: the sense of being at the start of something marvelous.”

“poetry that has less to do with saying than with seeing—or rather the saying and the seeing are somehow one. The seeing is tactile, synnesthetic, and image presented in such a way that it isn’t merely beheld, but embraced and felt: “it was August. / August! The light in the trees, full of fury. August / filling hands with language that tastes like smoke.” Kaminsky achieves in this elegy a quet grandeur ...Ilya Kaminsky bears watching. He has a fine ear and a sharp eye. Above all, he has a purity of outlook that is akin to innoncence — and every bit as appealing.”

“Ilya Kaminsky’s poetry has a glorious tilt and scope. His art is worthy of his two countries, and of the poet who is his subject as well as his guiding spirit in Musica Humana.”

“In a radically original, playful style full of surprising jumps, varying rhythms and astonishing images…in the poem ‘Praise’ he writes: ‘This is how we live on earth, a flock of sparrows. / The darkness, a magician, finds quarters/ behind our ears. We don’t know what life is,/ who makes it, the reality is thick/ with longing. We put it up to our lips/ and drink.’ We as readers and writers are indeed blessed by his presence in our lives through his amazing poetry.”

“In Musica Humana, Ilya Kaminsky writes . . . “poetry is the self/–I resist the self,” and so in its place, this remarkable poet becomes a citizen of the Republic of Psalms, and writes his history of snow, his inventory of wonder, and out of more than one silence pays homage to his beloved makers, Mandelstam and Akhmatova, while becoming their unanticipated heir.”

“Destined to become international giant of a poet, Kaminsky has created something more expansive than a voyage. With simple tools and with great compassions, he has made a prayer for the living.”

“In the most profound sense, Kaminsky answers to Mandelshtam’s demand that poetry should infuse human world — made progressively icier by technology and ideology — with ‘teleological warmth’, and thus humanize it. All fascination with the purity of an inhuman or superhuman is alien to him. The adjective of the chapbook’s Latin title is present here as a wish and its fulfillment. Montale would have found much to praise in this complexity of tone, and indeed much to recognize in this young poet’s evocation of a landscape of childhood suffused with both beauty and threat. In the first poem [Kaminsky] writes: ‘poetry is the self—I resist / the self’. The delighted difficulty of this poetic ‘I’ is a great gift to American poetry.”

“A superb and vigorous imagination, a poetic talent of rare and beautiful proportions, whose work is surely destined to be widely and enthusiastically noticed and applauded.”