Deaf Republic: Poems

By: Ilya Kaminsky

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Synopsis: Finalist for the National Book Award*Finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Award*Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award* Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book 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 Kaminsky's astonishing parable in poems asks us, What is silence? This book 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.