Deaf Republic
A Lyric Essay

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; and a finalist for the Forward Prize for Best Collection Ilya Kaminsky's astonishing parable in poems asks us, What is silence? 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.