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.
