PositiveThe Rupture... a bracing literary accomplishment that challenges traditional conceptions of the domains in which poetry can succeed ... It is quite a feat to watch as Kaminsky repeatedly brushes up against these fabulist and dystopian tropes without allowing them to overtake the work itself as he manages instead to wield their import as a means of defamiliarizing certain iterations of violence and oppression that many in his American readership have come to dissociate from their own society ... At first blush, these graphic representations seem a bit out of place in a book of poems, though it does not take long for them to do their work. Like complementary subtitles that appear at the bottom of our screen, we come to recognize them as instructions that eventually show us how to see certain events of Deaf Republic as if we ourselves were conscripted as members of its chorus ... the signs in Deaf Republic allow Kaminsky to show his readers a new symbol through which we can redefine our relationship to a story that is currently being told today in the streets of Crimea and the West Bank, Belfast and Minneapolis, Chicago and Harare, in the shadows of our own hearts and in every crowd that gathers across the globe.
