My Poetry Corner January 2024 features the poem "In a Time of Peace" from the poetry collection Deaf Republic (USA, 2019) by Ilya Kaminsky, an award-winning poet who was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in January 2023. Such literary recognition earned him a position at the Lewis Center for the Art's Program in Creative Writing at Princeton University in New Jersey, where he now lives with his wife.
Born in 1977 in Odessa—in what was then the Soviet Union, now Ukraine—he was sixteen years old when his family was granted political asylum in the United States, settling in Rochester, New York. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science at Georgetown University, Washington DC, and a Juris Doctor law degree at the University of California, Hastings College of Law (now UC Law San Francisco). After a career as a law clerk in San Francisco, the success of his debut poetry collection, Dancing in Odessa (2004), brought new opportunities of teaching creative writing and poetry in both undergraduate and MFA programs.
Kaminsky's award-winning poetry collection Deaf Republic is structured as a two-act play set in the military occupied fictional town of Vasenka. The narrative begins with the tragic opening scene in "Gunshot." While breaking up a protest, a soldier shoots and kills Petya, a young deaf boy enjoying a puppet show in the town's square. The gunshot renders the entire town deaf (p. 11): The sound we do not hear lifts the gulls off the water.
In "Deafness, an Insurgency, Begins" (p. 14), the boy's dead body still lies in the square. Our country woke up next morning and refused to hear soldiers. / In the name of Petya, we refuse…. / By eleven a.m., arrests begin. / Our hearing doesn't weaken, but something silent in us strengthens…. // In the ears of the town, snow falls.
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