By Ali Nuri

Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic is a visceral exploration of quieted dissent in the face of unspeakable brutality. In the besieged town of Vasenka, where military forces commit an inexcusable atrocity, silence is weaponized as the townspeople deafen themselves in retaliation for the murder of a deaf boy named Petya. Here, language is expertly wielded by means of wordlessness and the acts of war cease to be heard. Instead, the destruction is felt in the reverberations through the earth and through one another:

It has begun: I see the blue canary of my country
pick breadcrumbs from each citizen’s eyes—
pick breadcrumbs from my neighbors’ hair—
the snow leaves the earth and falls straight up as it
    should—
to have a country, so important—
to run into walls, into streetlights, into loved ones, as
    one should—
The blue canary of my country
runs into walls, into streetlights, into loved ones—
The blue canary of my country
watches their legs as they run and fall.

The citizens become like puppets in a theatrical production, standing discreetly on the “stage” of their country, speaking with hands, touch, and an abundance of feeling—a language that their tormentors do not understand. Sensing abandonment by the world and God, the townspeople take matters into their own hands, finding their fire “from a match [God] never lit”. In the epicenter of the collection, expectant newlyweds Sonya and Alfonso attempt to reconcile the lives they led before the war with their new normal, eventually becoming casualties as they join the opposition:

He who loves roofs, tonight and tonight, making love to
   her and to her forgetting, let them borrow the light
   from the blind.
There will be evidence, there will be evidence.
While helicopters bomb the streets, whatever they will
   open, will open.
What is silence? Something of the sky in us.

A town now torn, the events that unfold in Vasenka stand as a microcosm for not only America’s involvement in wars abroad but also the paranoia and polarization caused by its militarized police force. It is in these hushed acts of violence where “the nakedness of a whole nation” is held in the mouths of its discarded. Dehumanized, alienated, and stripped bare by “a peaceful country”, the collection comes full circle as an indirect admonishment for the lack of concern:

Today
I have to screw on the expression of a person

though I am at most an animal
and the animal I am spirals

from the funeral to his kitchen, shouts: I have come,
   God, I have come running to you—
in snow-drifted streets, I stand like a flagpole

without a flag.

Deaf Republic delivers a captivating and timeless yet urgently necessary message on the power small rebellions have in a country that oftentimes chooses willful (and prideful) ignorance over ethical self-reflection. Through Kaminsky’s haunting verse, silence reveals itself to be tripartite: the silence of the devoted, the silence of the departed, and the silence of the defiant whose actions speak louder than words.