![]() ![]() In a 2018 interview with Edward Clifford for The Massachusetts Review, Kaminsky described writing in his second language as “a parallel reality, an insanely beautiful freedom.” “There is a beauty in falling in love with a language - the strangeness of its sounds, the awe of watching the sea-surf of a new syntax beating again and again the cement of your unknowing,” he told Clifford. ![]() After the death of his father one year later, Kaminsky began writing poems in English - a language he has never clearly heard. Escaping religious persecution, his family immigrated to the United States when they were granted political asylum in 1993. The author of the Dorset Prize-winning book Dancing In Odessa, Kaminsky grew up in the former Soviet Union and lost most of his hearing at the age of 4. Is it an act of defiance? Is it the only way to live, as a way of life collapses? The book’s cardinal, double-edged metaphor is this: After an occupying soldier executes a deaf boy at a protest, the entire country is rendered deaf. “We Lived Happily during the War,” a narrator admits in the title of the opening poem, the first of poet Ilya Kaminsky’s long-awaited collection. ![]()
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