Poetry lives by specifics (indeed, this is what makes it the most effective weapon against demagogy and tyranny), and Kaminsky is wonderfully attentive to such repeating patterns of details, contributing to the impression that his book is a through-composed whole, rather than simply a sequence of individual poems. Civilian warfare is conjured most effectively through occasional vivid images ... part of the power of Deaf Republic lies in its exercise of the imagination ... And Deaf Republic is no easy book. A visit to this republic will not leave the reader unchanged.
... extraordinary ... Love poems... are mingled with poems of grief-stricken horror... and protest... as the book winds toward its dark conclusion. 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.
Deaf Republic shares with Joyce’s works, too, a certain difficulty that rewards close (and multiple) readings. But this difficulty is the book’s strength — on levels both poetic and political ... I’m tempted to say I wish the book had ended [earlier]... But a final poem — 'In a Time Of Peace'— serves as a kind of bookend-sequel to [the first poem]. Unfortunately, without the lens of fictional narrative, much of this last poem feels like being tapped repeatedly on the shoulder and asked whether we’ve “gotten” the book’s analogy between Vasenka and contemporary America ... Deaf Republic is a masterfully wrought collection, and this last stanza [of the book] does justice to every line that precedes it.
... poems of searing observation, trembling beauty, and power ... it is a testament to Kaminsky’s great skill and maturity as a poet that it’s not just the shrouds of anger or despair that follow the reader out of each cell of the Deaf Republic.
... 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. Kaminsky’s engagement with Soviet poets who wrote in the face of authoritarian regimes, and for whom poetry had unthinkably high stakes, imbues this work with urgency and pathos ... The most moving aspect of the collection is Kaminsky’s ability to infuse beauty and even irony into this difficult work.
Kaminsky’s language is accessible, yet it runs on a logic that feels of a different place. It sings with a necessary freshness ... Sign-language illustrations appear intermittently throughout the book...This offers a respite, making the book appear as safe as a manual or a children’s story. The weight of what the poems tell us is almost eased. But behind these illustrations are palmfuls of tension as well as collective grief and anger ... The narrative is parceled out in lines and poems that expertly manipulate space. We can’t escape the horror because it exists again from a new perspective or on yet another page ... yet, there is joy in this harrowing story of fragility and limited rights ... While deftly describing an imaginary place, this book seems to dangle us over the precipice of the here and now, to push us to see the equal and opposite forces that reflect how broken we are and how we manage to go on. We see so clearly even how we turn away from what we can’t bear to see.
... uses deafness and sign language as a powerful metaphor for the capability to stand up to brutal regimes, the refusal to cooperate with evil, and our shared reactions to the violence of the world. It’s a book about love, the power of communication, horrific evil, and the double edge of silence ... If Kaminsky’s Dancing in Odessa was a joyful yet unsparing narrative of a boy, and the history of the city he came from, Deaf Republic is something altogether different: more ambitious, more sprawling, more imaginative ... One of the most impressive aspects of Deaf Republic is the way disability—the plague of deafness that the soldiers vow to annihilate—is an expression of rebellion, an act of defiance against inhumanity ... The poetic forms in this book indicate a narrative ambition that’s rarely seen in poetry collections. The story that Kaminsky intends to tell could have been contained just as easily in a play or in traditional lyric fiction. But Kaminsky’s ability to juxtapose stark reminders of evil with little pleasures could only be contained within the small, dense spaces of poetry ... challenges us to think about listening, silence, and communication in a world that regards both violence and joy with dull indifference ... offers a way to consider how we challenge the evils we encounter every day, and how we value the small pleasures offered in the time 'between bombardments.'
Entering this book is like entering the narrative of sleepers who waken into a global realization of humanity at its best and worst ... Life and death crouch beside each other in this poetic narrative like two doves on a wire ... While cruelty happens, the watchers do not interfere, and in this book, the watchers are all of us. There is so much love and lilt of morning in this poetry of violence. The poetry itself is a pause, a silence between rage and war.
Kaminsky delivers another stunning achievement ... When [Kaminsky] breaks the fourth wall in the final few pages, the reader is shaken to remember this story is about the US ... Even as we exit Deaf Republic, coming back to our seats in the darkened theater, Kaminsky invokes silence, that invention of the hearing, the deadly bullet ricocheting off the balcony seats.
... A one-of-a-kind book unlike anything I have read ... The meta-narrative speaks poignantly to me in 2019 surrounded by stories and images of war and violence from all around the globe ... I have read poetry books that have a narrative thread, but none as captivating as Kaminsky’s ... Yes, the book tells a story of the violence of war. Its victims. But the deaths in this book, poem by poem, are also triumphs of the human spirit against tyranny. And before they die they experience beauty and bring beauty to the world. And even in the bombed out ruins of the city there is astonishment ... Let me be clear, his book is an astonishing imaginative project. Each poem, its own complete vehicle, chassis and body, but each poem part of a larger narrative ... The narrative is compelling in this book but the lyric moments give it its lasting impact ... I am left at the end of Deaf Republic deeply challenged ... Thank you, Ilya, for helping me hear more, see more, feel more.
... an important literary event ... Read these poems aloud and weep ... 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.
... the stunning poems in this volume frequently end not with a final line, but instead with dictionary entries, translating spoken words into American Sign Language. In such a way, the poems transcend speech, just as Stonecipher’s prose paragraphs embrace elision and rupture if only for possibility to accumulate within their luminous architectures ... Within the world of these poems, silence becomes both a foreshadowing and an appeal, as these gaps leave room for the reader to participate in the poems’ revolutionary politics.
Kaminsky bookends this collection, chillingly, with poems that directly confront the reader with our inaction in the face of atrocity, implicating himself as well ... prescient and incisive...
Kaminsky grounds the collection with layered images and concrete details that serve as shifting metaphors ... Deaf Republic is a one-sitting read, a book of poetry both complex and accessible. The concepts of collective silence in response to war and the many applications of deafness are artfully traversed. The poems set during peacetime show that even when a society thinks it is at peace, it may not be. With lyrical and fearless language, Ilya Kaminsky has written an engrossing page-turner that challenges society’s silence, and celebrates the power of community in the face of violent atrocities.
Ilya Kaminsky’s second book of poetry, Deaf Republic, contains some of the most exquisite lines you’ll find in contemporary poetry, lines that vibrate with soft-spoken yet urgent, ethical anxiety ... But what about the drawn hand-gestures found in the pages of the book? Their purpose seems questionable, especially since the drawings are accompanied by English subtitles. Unlike the rest of the book, which is filled with sharp inquiries into the various depths of silence and speech, these drawings feel like an afterthought, tacked on ... The book could have done without these drawings of hand signs and without some of the other more heavy-handed moments ... brilliant ...
The light that shines from the language in Deaf Republic illuminates the terrible truths about what Philip Larkin called 'the misery that man hands on to man' ... Kaminsky has found an uplifting, canny way to memorialize his hometown’s martyrs, while simultaneously erasing the names of the Nazi fascists from human memory ... stringent medicine for all nations, especially powerful ones that have grown slack in their apprehension and practice of the 'categorical imperative.' With its lapidary, figurative conceits, this poem that weaves in and out of poetry, drama, and prose as a hybrid and liminal tour de force works on both the stage and page as a poignant reminder for our present age of the proverbial dangers of fascism’s recrudescence.
The craft and the moral weight of this work left this reader in awe ... The poems center on several themes: how to resist, how poetry can or cannot address violence, despair, hope, and complicity. These are not small topics but explored via Kaminsky’s deft hand, images, and humor, we get...a conflict inherent in this work: can poetry be used to describe the horrors of occupation? Obviously, the book is evidence he believes it can, and yet, one of the strongest moments in the book refutes poetic tools ... line breaks simultaneously delight in their layering of meaning and point to the horror of our own culpability. Kaminsky makes sure structure matches meaning ... a dramatic poetic fable for our time. We are now in a deaf republic where so many are willingly deaf to others. These poems help us to listen.
... 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'.
... a stunning interplay of poetic structures and voices ... The motifs of deafness and silence are seamlessly paired via their cause-and-effect relationship, as well as the motif of watching—the speakers’ desperate appeal for a witness and judgment. As different speakers issue prayers to God, the ultimate witness and judge, so does Deaf Republic call forth a witness—to listen ... Kaminsky wields an intelligent array of motifs in the body and its exposure, as well as the body’s symbiotic relationship with puppets ... ultimately links the ubiquity of ignorance with its destructive outcomes: in boys who desire to kill a man but have no idea how, in two nations for whom the speaker pleads forgiveness for doing nothing as America and the bodies of boys fall.
Kaminsky, for me, is being crystal clear about his poetic intent. Poetry is record (of course it is), and this collection is some/sum record, but do the math, and it adds up – every poem in Deaf Republic is also (forgive us) a mirror, reflecting us, ourselves, back to ourselves ... the power in this collection is not that it hits us over the head with this, again and again, as if it were hammering home a nail. No. Kaminsky’s skill is that he is able to do this to us with the lightest touch of language.
What results is a riveting and emotional story line with parallels to the author’s life, which relies on plain spoken diction, repetition, and small moments of romantic desire to anchor its larger political themes. Moments of brilliance shine through... though some readers may feel that the story would be better suited to the stage.
The eeriness of this deaf republic is found as much in its puppet shows as in the violence between the soldiers and the deaf. Kaminsky also introduces a sign language into the poem, through which the citizens can communicate, in spite of the military occupation, and which – in a bold move – the book asks us too to learn to read ... aspires to a universal application, but invites us to look again at one country in particular ... bears comparison with other excellent North American imports of recent years: Anne Carson, Claudia Rankine and Danez Smith. Deaf Republic should also compel readers on this side of the Atlantic.
There’s nothing wooden about Kaminsky’s poetry now. It bursts with energy and can sometimes display internal stresses that make its texture shift and warp ... grim reading ... But Kaminsky doesn’t just offer vivid representations of violence. In Deaf Republic the pressure of tyranny intensifies the dangerous delights of love to a surreal vividness – this aspect of Kaminsky’s work is reminiscent of Bulgakov, or indeed Tsvetaeva ... re-creates Russia from the vantage point of contemporary America and hints at analogies between the two worlds. These analogies contribute to the disturbing power of Deaf Republic, but they can also generate the odd false note ... The implied parallel between Soviet oppression and American state violence is not intended to be comfortable, but it may cause discomfort in a way that Kaminsky does not intend. It raises a problem of scale: a bit like his uneasy juxtaposition of his grandfathers fighting the Germans in their tractors and his own suitcase full of Brodsky. How fully do the systematic murders and abductions in neo-Stalinist Vasenka equate to contemporary acts of police violence? ... Kaminsky is honest enough to pose the question. But, because he can’t quite answer it, the two ‘American’ bookends to Deaf Republic are much less vivid than the depictions of violence and familial love that occupy its neo-Soviet centre ... Reimagining the literature of Stalin’s terror carries two big risks. The first is trivialising catastrophic horror by comparing it to lesser horror. The second is appearing to exaggerate the ills of the present by forcing an analogy with events of a different order of magnitude. Probably no poet can fully overcome those risks, but Kaminsky is brave enough to take them on.
... 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.
... stunning ... portrays the persistent military occupation with disorienting and dreamlike lyrics ... at once intimate and sensual but also poignant and timely, with one speaker noting, 'I see the blue canary of my country / pick breadcrumbs from each citizen’s eyes.'
