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 . 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.
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