Books by Ilya Kaminsky

Deaf Republic

by Ilya Kaminsky

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.

ECCO ANTHOLOGY OF INTERNAT PB

by Ilya Kaminsky, Susan Harris, Words Without Words Without Borders

Edited by Ilya Kaminsky and Susan Harris of Words Without Borders, The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry offers a selection of the finest international poetry from the 20th century in the best English translations available.
Providing in many cases the first and only English language translations of acclaimed poets from the world over, The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry is a unique treasure and resource which Gregory Orr proclaims, “a stunning, indispensable anthology” and Edward Hirsch calls, “a modern book of wonders.”
“From canonical modernists like Valéry, Vallejo, and Pasternak to younger poets of today, the Ecco Anthology collects an amazing spectrum of poetic voices from around the world.”—John Ashbery

In the Shape of a Human Body I Am Visiting the Earth: Poems from Far and Wide

by Ilya Kaminsky, Dominic Luxford, Jesse Nathan

From Rae Armantrout to Adam Zagajewski, In the Shape of a Human Body I Am Visiting the Earth is a chorus of voices from around the globe and across generations. A compendium of some of our beloved poems from our favorite poets, this slim anthology is the perfect companion for cafés, road trips, bathtubs, shuttle expeditions, and any other situation in need of the genuinely human. Included are freshly translated masterpieces–originally published in Poetry International–from poets such as Pablo Neruda, Rainer Maria Rilke, Federico García Lorca, and Charles Baudelaire, along with new work from contemporary practitioners such as Kay Ryan, Jane Hirshfield, Derek Walcott, Kwame Dawes, Valzhyna Mort, and James Tate.

Gossip & Metaphysics: Russian Modernist Poems & Prose

by Ilya Kaminsky, Valzhyna Mort, Katie Farris

There has been no anthology in English dedicated to the poetics of the great generation of Russian modernists. For a group of poets so widely admired, relatively little seems known about their philosophy of poetry and their poetic influences, and although there is tremendous aesthetic diversity in this group, they have more in common than many readers assume. Russian poetry was a small world, made even smaller by the arrests, disappearances, pogroms, famines, assassinations, and political conflagration of the revolutionary era, and literary differences were often overcome by a mutual sense of historic cataclysm. This anthology’s structure is like textile, with many common threads intertwining, doubling back, sometimes unraveling―creating a matrix of poetic conversation: Mayakovsky on Khlebnikov, Pasternak on Mayakovsky, Tsvetaeva on Pasternak, Brodsky on Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova on Mandelstam. Shared themes range from expected (the word) to serendipitous (the ocean). Above all these poets are obsessed with proximity―to God, to nature and place, to poetic predecessors, to language (their own and others), and always, forever, to the inexpressible.

Vija Celmins

by Ilya Kaminsky, Andrew Winer, Marlene Dumas, Glenn Ligon, Katie Farris, Robert Gober

More than 90 of Celmins' astonishing hyperrealistic paintings are contextualized with writings by the artist herself and by luminaries including Teju Cole, Rachel Cusk and Marlene Dumas

Latvian American artist Vija Celmins (born 1938) is a master of subtle visual power. She is best known for her captivating paintings and drawings depicting galaxies, surfaces of the moon, desert floors, oceans and spider webs. Her works are not monumental; they are painted with a restrained palette and defy quick viewing. But once you are involved with them, your gaze gets caught up in them and they unfold their fascination and great beauty. This monograph presents all her approximately 90 exhibited artworks as well as a selection of documentary photographs. Several commentaries by the artist on her works are included, most of them published for the first time. Contributions by renowned authors and artists such as Julian Bell, Teju Cole, Rachel Cusk, Marlene Dumas and Robert Gober provide new perspectives on the artist's impressive oeuvre.