Poets & Writers Theater

In this Harvard Radcliffe Institute event, Ilya Kaminsky reads a selection of poems from his collection Deaf Republic (Graywolf Press, 2019), including “We Lived Happily During the War” and “While the Child Sleeps, Sonya Undresses,” and discusses being an immigrant and poet in between languages in a conversation with Stephanie Sandler.

“Quiet thinking is like a current in the sea and moves freely until it’s disturbed by its own voice, and then it becomes a music each individual sings when speaking. This is what we hear when we hear Ilya read,” says poet Fanny Howe introducing Ilya Kaminsky at this 2018 reading of his poetry collection Deaf Republic (Graywolf Press, 2019) at Harvard University’s Woodberry Poetry Room.

“Let them borrow the light from the blind. / Let them kiss your forehead, approached from every angle. / What is silence? Something of the sky in us.” Joseph Fasano reads an excerpt from Ilya Kaminsky’s new collection, Deaf Republic (Graywolf Press, 2019), for the American Poem video series. An interview with Kaminsky by Garth Greenwell appears in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.