Network Node
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Name:
Ilya Kaminsky
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City/Place:
Atlanta, Georgia
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Country:
United States
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Hometown:
Odessa, Ukraine
CURATION
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from this node by:
Matrix
Current News
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What's Up?
Named by BBC “one of 12 artists that changed the world”
Life & Work
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Bio:
Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odessa, former Soviet Union in 1977, and arrived to the United States in 1993, when his family was granted asylum by the American government.
He is the author of Deaf Republic (Graywolf Press) and Dancing In Odessa (Tupelo Press) and co-editor and co-translated many other books, including Ecco Anthology of International Poetry (Harper Collins) and Dark Elderberry Branch: Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva (Alice James Books).
His work won The Los Angeles Times Book Award, The Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, The National Jewish Book Award, the Guggenheim Fellowship, The Whiting Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Metcalf Award, Lannan Fellowship, Academy of American Poets’ Fellowship, NEA Fellowship, Poetry magazine's Levinson Prize, and was also shortlisted for the National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, Neustadt International Literature Prize, and T.S. Eliot Prize (UK).
Deaf Republic was The New York Times’ Notable Book for 2019, and was also named Best Book of 2019 by dozens of other publications, including Washington Post, Times Literary Supplement, The Telegraph, Publishers Weekly, The Guardian, Irish Times, Vanity Fair, Lithub, Library Journal, and New Statesman.
His poems have been translated into over twenty languages, and his books are published in many countries, including Turkey, Netherlands, Germany, Russia, France, Mexico, Macedonia, Romania, Spain and China, where his poetry was awarded the Yinchuan International Poetry Prize. In 2019, Kaminsky was selected by BBC as “one of the 12 artists that changed the world.”
Ilya Kaminsky has worked as a law clerk for San Francisco Legal Aid and the National Immigration Law Center. More recently, he worked pro-bono as the Court Appointed Special Advocate for Orphaned Children in Southern California. Currently, he holds the Bourne Chair in Poetry at Georgia Institute of Technology and lives in Atlanta.
More
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Quotes, Notes & Etc.
“Ilya Kaminsky’s long-awaited Deaf Republic is a contemporary epic. Evident throughout is a profound imagination, matched only by the poet’s ability to create a republic of conscience that is ultimately ours, too, and ”
— Kevin Young, The New Yorker
“In this extraordinary book-length narrative work, 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.”
— Craig Morgan Teicher, NPR
“This extraordinary poetry collection is structured as a two act play in which an occupying army kills a deaf boy and villagers respond by marshaling a wall of silence as a source of resistance...These poems bestow the power of sacred drama on a secular martyrology...a superb and vigorous imagination, a poetic talent of rare and beautiful proportions...A visit to this republic will not leave the reader unchanged.”
— The New York Times
“Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic is a work of genius and a true work of art.”
— Tayari Jones, The Times, (UK)
“In Kaminsky’s soulful new collection the language is exquisite; the ethical questions Kaminsky poses are provocative.”
— Entertainment Weekly
“I fell hard for Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic. Part folklore, fable, war story and love poem, it imagines an occupied town falling deaf in response to the shooting of a child. Often devastating, always humane, this is a book of the century, let alone this year.”
— Fiona Benson, The Guardian
“Stunning. . . . At once intimate and sensual but also poignant and timely.”
— Booklist, starred review
“Mesmerizing”
— Joyce Carol Oates
“Intoxicating and wondrous. . . . In these sincere, striking poems, Kaminsky posits the beauty of this world as essential.”
— Book Page
“Deaf Republic continues to haunt me. It’s a parable that comes to life and refuses to die.”
— Rita Dove, in her citation for Ainsfield-Wolf Book Award
“...evocative, satirical, internationally revered. This work was 15 years in the making, a political allegory, a boldly sensual love story”
— Gillian Reynolds, The Times (UK)
“I was stunned by Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic, lyric poems presented as a play in two acts, set in a country in crisis, inspired both by Odessa, where Kaminsky grew up, and America, where he now lives. It’s a book about censorship, political apathy, torture — “the nakedness / of the whole nation” — but also about tomato sandwiches, the birth of a daughter and the sudden, almost shocking joys of longtime married life.”
— Parul Sehgal, New York Times
“Extraordinary, haunting”
— BBC
“Not merely one of the best, most surprising, beautiful, tragic, gripping, and sadly relevant books of the year, but arguably of the entire decade. ”
— Via Negativa
“If I may, it’s not too soon, or a stretch, to claim that Deaf Republic a 21st century classic.”
— Sana Goyal, Huffington Post
“Deaf Republic is amazing: gripping narrative, powerful images, historically relevant. Do yourself a favor and read it.”
— Viet Thanh Nguyen
“Extraordinary”
— The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“This hybrid work is a testament to the human spirit. The book’s political esprit de corps, its savvy innovation, and visual beauty (rooted in defiant puppetry and hallowing sign language) make Deaf Republic feel like a contemporary classic.”
— Judges' citation for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize
“How is it that one poet can make the silence visible? How is that one poet can illustrate – and enlighten – our collective deafness? Deaf Republic is a remarkable book of poems from one of the great symphonic voices of our times. A deep bow.”
— Colum McCann
“Riveting and emotional.”
— Publishers Weekly, starred review
“A narrative that explores how we think about silence – as rebellion, but also as fearful failure to act: “We lived happily during the war / and when they bombed other people’s houses, we / protested / but not enough”. Kaminsky, who lost most of his hearing at the age of four, left the former Soviet Union as a teenager and was granted asylum in the US; his tale of upheaval in an occupied territory speaks to our current political anxieties. But Deaf Republic 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”.”
— Ben Wilkinson, The Guardian
“The product of 15 years of meditation, this chilling work heralds the maturity of an important voice in world poetry.”
— Library Journal, starred review
“I don’t know why it took me so long to pick up Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic , but it’s tremendous. (You don’t have to take my word for it—just read the very first poem.)”
— Celeste Ng
“Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic is a dramatic masterwork, a parable-in-poems that confronts the darkness of war with the blazing light.”
— Poets & Writers magazine
“Kaminsky’s book bears comparison with other excellent North American imports of recent years: Anne Carson, Claudia Rankine [...] ,Deaf Republic should also compel readers on this side of the Atlantic.”
— Irish Times
“Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky might appeal even more. This absorbing, tender, singular book is part drama, part sequence, powerfully and essentially international – Kaminsky is a Russian immigrant to the US – and always at the thrilling boundaries of language.”
— Kate Clunchy, The Guardian
“I love Deaf Republic. It’s one of my favorite books of the year. It may be one of my favorite books of all time. ”
— D. A. Powell, Gulf Coast
“I read Deaf Republic in one swoop, felled. Ilya Kaminsky’s poems quickened me in a way I returned to, waking, in the middle of the night.”
— Poetry Northwest
“I read mostly classics. George Eliot, Evelyn Waugh, Woolf, over and over again. Same with poetry. Dickinson, Frost, Wordsworth, and Yeats. Then again, I did just read Ilya Kaminsky’s 2019 collection, Deaf Republic, and was blown away.”
— Jay Parini, Boston Globe
“Tour-de-force collection of poems”
— Atlanta InTown
“If you were to read only one book of poetry in 2019, this should be it.”
— Poetry Review (UK)
“I continue to return to Amiri Baraka’s work to be saved, to Lucille Clifton’s, to June Jordan’s. To Ilya Kaminsky’s work to figure out what it is to love and also continue forth in times of revolution and injustice.”
— Danez Smith, Barren Magazine
“...drama that combines themes of political violence, familial love, generation – and the subject of deafness. In some respects sombre, in others joyous, one of its several distinctions is to be properly observant of things-in-themselves, while at the same time being richly metaphoric. It’s a compelling mixture...”
— Andrew Motion, TLS
“Brilliant ”
— PBS News Hour
“A theatrics of word and silence Deaf Republic imagines a world which could very well be our own: a town is occupied, a deaf child is murdered, a collectivity forms in resistance. While there is dystopia—a narrative, plotting pace—Ilya Kaminsky nevershies from the possibilities of lyric and collective upheaval. As imaginative as it is insurgent, Deaf Republic testifies to our silence, a silence that, already and still, “stands up for us.””
— National Book Award Jury's Citation
“What is silence? Something of the sky in us. Deaf Republic is changing my life.”
— Patricia Smith
“It’s an astounding, urgent and fresh creation.”
— Financial Times (UK)
“Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic was definitely the best collection I encountered. Kaminsky’s poetry manages to be both devastating and incredibly beautiful. It raises huge questions about responsibility, culpability and what it means to be human. ”
— Jan Carson, Irish Times
“Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic—holy good god, it’s a masterpiece. A true masterpiece.”
— Kaveh Akbar
“I find I read more poetry in times of difficulty. I don’t necessarily want something that’s uplifting or “comforting.” I look for work that feels like it acknowledges the magnitude of what we’re going through. A favourite poet of mine is Ilya Kaminsky. I love all his work”
— The Globe and Mail (Canada)
“Deaf Republic is 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.”
— Tablet
“Powerful. With lyrical and fearless language, Ilya Kaminsky has written an engrossing page-turner”
— The Seattle Times
“It’s ‘we’ in Deaf Republic because we are all victims, victimizers and those who stand around and watch. And yet, there is so much love and lilt of morning.”
— The Los Angeles Review
“Deaf Republic imagines the moment of resistance after a deaf boy is shot and killed. This form of resistance emerges that is almost not possible in our world, but it’s possible in this one. The town members all take on this kind of “silence” in the face of the aftermath as a way of not engaging with authority. It’s beautiful work around the idea of demonstrating that radical possibility.”
— Jos Charles, Subway Book Review
“Deaf Republic demonstrates that Kaminsky’s immense talent. It is a must-read for our turbulent times.”
— Michigan Quarterly Review
“Deaf Republic is a contemporary masterpiece. This book is proof that in 2019 great poetry can enjoy tremendous popularity.”
— Washington Examiner
“From this talented poet’s pen, magical phrases. Deaf Republic is a parable about society and the impact of reaction. Kaminsky, who has been mostly deaf since age four, transmutes disability into strength in this new collection. While deftly describing an imaginary place, this book seems to dangle us over the precipice of the here and now. The indomitable spirit of the townspeople—and of the poet Kaminsky—glistens in every line.”
— World Literature Review
“Ilya Kaminsky’s ability to create such a rich landscape in only 60 lyric poems of a timely and beautiful jeremiad: a devastatingly powerful indictment of complacency”
— Henry Louis Gates, PBS Special
“Deaf Republic, a fable of love and war [is] set in an imaginary town called Vasenka. Vasenka has an old-world feel yet —like all great poetry— its story speaks urgently to the present.”
— Raymond Antrobus, The Telegraph (UK)
“Ilya Kaminsky’s poetry collection Deaf Republic has blown my mind”
— Sarah M. Broom, Boston Globe
“In Kaminsky’s lines, sound takes visible shape. The ordinary things of the world transmogrify, and a small detail, stripped down, takes on the weight of a country.”
— The Critical Flame
“He’s created a profound collection to rattle the frenetic noise of our times.”
— The New York Observer
“Deaf Republic a stunning and prescient drama, like the best books of Marquez and Kundera. Not many American poets, not many poets anywhere are engaged in this kind of work. I think that Deaf Republic will be a splendid, groundbreaking moment. Reading this book, my overwhelming sense is admiration and pleasure.”
— Kwame Dawes
“There is a rich and expert play of form and style so that this sense of shocked ‘convulsion’ never leaves the page.”
— PN Review (UK)
“Prescient and incisive.”
— Minneapolis Star Tribune
“After a soldier kills Petya, a young deaf boy in Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic, the townspeople of Vasenka protest by refusing to hear: “Our hearing doesn’t weaken, but something silent in us strengthens.” This dramatic narrative poem follows the lives of two married puppeteers, Sonya and Alfonso, as well as others, whose resistance unfolds into a searing indictment against authoritarianism. “Ours is a country in which a boy shot by police lies on the pavement for hours.” Echoing Kaminsky’s native Russia and the US where he now lives, Vasenka is a fictional stage where his prophecy is meted out with dark humour, gorgeous language and surprising tenderness.”
— Sandeep Parmar, The Guardian
“There is hard-earned, luminous simplicity in such paradoxical figures, a simplicity that reminds one that candor is as much about white-hot heat as it is about truth-telling. Perhaps the most profound lines of the book—lines invoking theology, morality, complicity, and free will—are among its simplest: “At the trial of God, we will ask: why did you allow all this? / And the answer will be an echo: why did you allow all this?” One notes that there need not be a god for the answer to come.”
— Stephen Kampa, The Hopkins Review
“Ilya Kaminsky’s long-awaited Deaf Republic arrives on the shelf of immediate masterworks. As powerfully filmic as it is verbal, Kaminsky’s originalities of language and story are hewn from bedrock necessities. His people and their fates carry the visionary authority, spareness, objectivity and tenderness of Kafka or Brech or Anna Swir. Deaf Republic’sextended parable speaks directly in the ears, mind, and heart of our own harrowed and harrowing time, signing what is already and always happening.”
— Jane Hirshfield, Ploughshares
“Cutting-edge, sweeping drama”
— The Washington Post
“I read Deaf Republic with feverish excitement and deepening wonder. There is rage in these pages, urgency and force and also a great, redeeming beauty. Ilya Kaminsky’s lines buzz with a kind of electric freshness; reading them is like laying your hand on the live wire of poetry. He’s the most brilliant poet of his generation, one of the world’s few geniuses.”
— Garth Greenwell
“Aggrieved, inconsolable, and yet ecstatic, comic, and indefatigably in love with the world. Deaf Republic is a book of wonders.”
— Li-Young Lee
“This book has brought to the poetry world a kind of trembling, manic anticipation. . . Deaf Republic is a masterfully wrought collection.”
— The Los Angeles Review of Books
“The peculiar achievement of Deaf Republic—echoey with calls and responses, song and clamor—is that the whole is not simply greater than its parts: it is their counterargument, their antidote. Any one page captures a shattered, shuddered utterance [...] No new music is sparser, more letter-perfect, than Kaminsky’s.”
— Christopher Spaide, Poetry
“Deaf Republic is a book of transcendence....[it] will be spoken about for years to come.”
— Nick Ripatrazone, The Millions
“Deaf Republic does more than engage us as readers—it pulls us into the narrative and demands we see ourselves in Vasenka, as a member of the town with choices to make about how to respond to the power that surrounds us.”
— The Rumpus
“Deaf Republic is conscience, terror, silence, rage, made to coexist moments of tenderness, piercing beauty, empathic lyricism.”
— Tracy K. Smith
“In the poetry world, Kaminsky’s second book has been wondered about second-act on par to Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead. Why? The Ukrainian-born Kaminsky is a kind of walking IMDB of poetry, libraries of world’s verse and all their music live inside him. In ‘Deaf Republic,’ Kaminsky truly emerges and it’s a glorious thing to behold.”
— John Freeman, LitHub
“Deaf Republic is a work that may well survive civilization itself. It is a book of small graces, of resistance, of inordinate, unconditional humanity that brought me—I’m not ashamed to admit—to tears. ”
— The Sewanee Review
“Kaminsky is and has always been a chronicler of humanity itself, an amplifier of all its music, heard and unheard. With this timely, occasionally terrifying, and perfectly structured book, Kaminsky proves something else: that he is also the clear heir to a magnificent tradition rooted in Odessa, his native city.”
— Aviya Kushner, The Forward
“Sign language is often portrayed as primitive and pantomime-esque, or ridiculed as a “non-language”, but in the pages of Deaf Republic signs become symbols of residence and transformation. It is authoritarian soldiers who speak “the language no one understands.”
— Raymond Antrobus, The Telegraph (UK)
“All of Kaminsky’s work does what Wallace Stevens said modern poetry must do: “It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place. / It has to face the men of the time and to meet / The women of the time. It has to think about war / And it has to find what will suffice.” Kaminsky’s latest book, Deaf Republic, thinks deeply about war, opening with one kind of state violence (“And when they bombed other people’s houses, we // protested / but not enough”) and closing with another: “Ours is a country in which a boy shot by police lies on the pavement / for hours.” It finds, painfully and tenderly, what will suffice: the love between a husband and wife (“I am not a poet, Sonya, / I want to live in your hair”); the wonder of sensory experience (“How bright is the sky / as the avenue spins on its axis”). And through its sense-soaked imagery and bold experimentation, it is, to quote Stevens’s last requirement, living.
Kaminsky speaks of our darkest days, of tyranny and death. Yet he sings of the world—of poetry and dance and sex and love—with the highest praise. As he writes in Deaf Republic, “You will find me, God, / like a dumb pigeon’s beak, I am / pecking / every which way at astonishment.”
— Anthony Domestico, Commonweal
“Groundbreaking”
— Jewish Currents
“Deaf Republic is a book about war, and I’ve read a lot of books about war, but few as capable of mining that gray space where resistance and cowardice intersect. In Kaminsky’s work there is, amidst the violent oppression of wartime, room for love, lust, self-interest, self-sabotage—room for so much humanness, so much life. ”
— Omar El Akkad, The Millions
“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.”
— PANK
“Stunning poems”
— Brooklyn Rail
“There are many things that set this book apart, but none more than the way it refuses to hold the pathos of protest at arm’s length, zooming in on ever proud and shameful facet of the human conscience that, in rare moment of courage, becomes the only thing capable of holding the state at bay. As long as that courage is felt, it is truly dazzling.”
— The London Magazine
“It is rare to experience such a shock in a lyric. Deaf Republic is a poetic tragedy of great depth. ”
— Vårt Land (Norway)
“The exposed nerve of human compassion”
— The Carolina Quarterly (Duke University)
“Stunning achievement.”
— Kenyon Review
“Deaf Republic left me with one of those ethereally haunting feelings (still lingering). It is indeed a ‘fable’ of poetically epic proportions. ”
— Denise Hill, New Pages
“Breathtaking”
— American Poet
Clips (more may be added)
What's Been Happening?
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IN THE BEGINNING THERE WAS BRAZIL: "The time has come for these bronzed people to show their worth..." (Assis Valente)
Quincy Jones>Alfredo Rodriguez>Munir Hossn>Roberto Mendes>Alumínio & João Saturno
II. AND THE MISSION (THE OPEN WORLD)
III. AND THE MIT ECONOMIST BEHIND THE CREATION OF THE BRAZIL-BORN Integrated Global Creative Economy
Matrix team-member Darius Mans, Economist (PhD, MIT), president of Africare (largest aid organization in Africa), presents Africare award to Lula (2012). From 2000 to 2004 Darius served as the World Bank’s Country Director for Mozambique and Angola, leading a team which generated $150 million in annual lending, including support for public private partnerships in infrastructure which catalyzed over $1 billion in private investment. Darius lives between Washington D.C. and Salvador, Bahia.
IV. LET THERE BE PATHWAYS!
"I am thrilled to receive your email! Thank you for including me in this wonderful matrix."
— Susan Rogers, Personal recording engineer for Prince at Paisley Park Recording Studio; Director, Music Perception & Cognition Laboratory, Berklee College of Music
"Many thanks for this - I am touched!" — Julian Lloyd Webber
"I'm truly thankful... Sohlangana ngokuzayo :)" — Nduduzo Makhathini, Blue Note Records
"Thanks, this is a brilliant idea!!" — Alicia Svigals, Klezmer violin, Founder of The Klezmatics
"This is super impressive work ! Congratulations ! Thanks for including me :)))" — Clarice Assad
"Thank you" — Banch Abegaze, manager, Kamasi Washington
The Matrix uncoils from the Recôncavo of Bahia, final port-of-call for more enslaved human beings than any other such throughout all of human history and from where some of the most physically and spiritually uplifting music ever made evolved...
...all essentially cut off from the world at large. But after 40,000 years of artistic creation by mankind, it's finally now possible to create bridges closely interconnecting all artists everywhere (having begun with the Saturno brothers above).
Curate anybody in here. You appear on their page. Anybody in here curates you, they appear on your page...
...plugged into a superpower: the small world phenomenon.
By the same mathematics positioning some 8 billion human beings within some 6 or so steps of each other, people in the Matrix tend to within close, accessible steps of everybody else inside the Matrix.
And by extension, to within discoverable reach of everybody everywhere on the planet.
Small world curation is the Matrix's unprecedented innovation.
Because 40,000 years is a long time to wait.
And if all art is discoverable from everywhere, then Brazil's is too.
"The time has come for these bronzed people to show their worth..."
(Music by Assis Valente. Clip by Betão Aguiar. The Matrix was built in Salvador's Centro Histórico above, incorporating these marvelous people.)
Brazil is not a European nation. It's not a North American nation. It's not an East Asian nation. It straddles — jungle and desert and dense urban centers — both the equator and the Tropic of Capricorn.
Brazil absorbed over ten times the number of enslaved Africans taken to the United States of America, and is a repository of African deities (and their music) now largely forgotten in their lands of origin.
Brazil was a refuge (of sorts) for Sephardim fleeing an Inquisition which followed them across the Atlantic (that unofficial symbol of Brazil's national music — the pandeiro — the hand drum in the opening scene above — was almost certainly brought to Brazil by these people).
Across the parched savannas of the interior of Brazil's culturally fecund nordeste/northeast, where wizard Hermeto Pascoal was born in Lagoa da Canoa (Lagoon of the Canoe) and raised in Olho d'Águia (Eye of the Eagle), much of Brazil's aboriginal population was absorbed into a caboclo/quilombola culture punctuated by the Star of David.
Three cultures — from three continents — running for their lives, their confluence forming an unprecedented fourth. Pandeirista on the roof.
Nowhere else but here. Brazil itself is a matrix.
