Deaf Republic: Poems
✍ Scribed by Ilya Kaminsky
- Publisher
- Graywolf Press
- Year
- 2018;2019
- Tongue
- en-US
- Category
- Fiction
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry
Ilya Kaminsky's astonishing parable in poems asks us, What is silence?__
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Deaf Republic 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.