Search results for ""Author Ilya Kaminsky""

BBC Radio 4 BOOK OF THE WEEKFORWARD PRIZE 2019 SHORTLISTPOETRY BOOK SOCIETY CHOICE 2019The long-awaited new collection from Ilya Kaminsky: a remarkable parable in poems which asks us, what is silence?Deaf Republic opens in a time of political unrest in an occupied territory. It is uncertain where we are or when, in what country or during what conflict, but we come to recognise that these events are also happening here, right now. This astonishing parable in poems unfolds episodically like a play, its powerful narrative provoked by a tragic opening scene: when soldiers breaking up a protest kill a deaf boy, the gunshot becomes the last thing the citizens hear - in that moment, all have gone deaf. Inside this silence, their dissent becomes coordinated by sign language. The story then follows the private lives of townspeople encircled by public violence: a newly married couple, Alfonso and Sonya, expecting their child; the daring Momma Galya, instigating the insurgency from her puppet theatre; and Galya's puppeteers, covertly teaching signs by day and by night heroically luring soldiers one by one to their deaths behind the curtain. At once a love story, an elegy, and an urgent plea, Deaf Republic confronts our time's vicious atrocities and our collective silence in the face of them.

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Described as 'a rich, reverberative dance with memories of a haunted city' (LA Times), the poems of the prize-winning debut Dancing in Odessa by Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic, draw on archetype, myth and Russian literary figures. Tightly realised domestic settings are invigorated with a contemporary relevance, humour and torment, and a distinctive, transcendent music. 'With his magical style in English, Kaminsky's poems in Dancing in Odessa seem like a literary counterpart to Chagall in which laws of gravity have been suspended and colors reassigned, but only to make everyday reality that much more indelible. His imagination is so transformative that we respond with equal measures of grief and exhilaration.' The American Academy of Arts and Letters'Dancing in Odessa by Ilya Kaminsky tops the list because he is one of those rarest of finds in this or any century, a writer who establishes what poetry can be.' The New York Times

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‘Time is different in Odesa. It’s a city outside of time’. As a child growing up in Kyiv, Yelena Yemchuk was fascinated by the reputation of Odesa as a free place during Soviet times. The city seemed full of contradictions — “acceptance but also danger. A place of jokes and characters, populated by outlaws and intellectuals.” She first visited Odesa in 2003 and returned in 2015 to begin to photograph the city and its inhabitants over a period of four years. In 1981, when Yemchuk was eleven years old, her family immigrated to the United States from their home in Kyiv, Ukraine. They could tell no-one out of their family of their plans to leave and going beyond the ‘Iron Curtain’ at the time meant they could never return to their home country. Ten years later, when Ukraine announced its independence, the artist was able to return to her home country to visit

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In "The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry", introduced and edited by Ilya Kaminsky and Susan Harris, poetic visions from the 20th century will be reinforced and in many ways revised. Alongside renowned masters, there will be many new discoveries - internationally celebrated poets who have rarely, if ever, been translated into English. In conjunction with the organization Words Without Borders - an online haven for international literature and an ally to writers all over the world-Ecco presents a paperback anthology that will surely serve as a canonical touchstone in the field of poetics, bringing voices from afar to readers everywhere. As aptly put in Words Without Borders' mission statement, this collection also serves as part of 'the ultimate aim to introduce exciting international writing to the general and literary public - travelers, teachers, students, publishers, and a new generation of eclectic readers - by presenting international literature not as a static, elite phenomenon, but a portal through which to explore the world'.

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