"this is a battle worthy of our weapons" on DEAF REPUBLIC by Ilya Kaminsky

I've been writing this post for a week, trying to express what I think Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky is about. How it fits into our life.
And then the news notification start rolling down my screen.

On the 15th of March, 2019, a man entered two New Zealand mosques and killed fifty people. Immediately, and weeks later, New Zealand women who are not muslim donned head scarves in solidarity, from the Prime Minister to reporters reporting on more recent harassments targeting women in headscarves. One such reporter, Samantha Hayes said, ““I’m wearing a headscarf today for her, and for the families and friends of those killed in Christchurch a week ago” (x).
We remember Joe Biden isn't just a pure man nursing a bromance with Obama.
People stuffed on concrete beneath an overpass, held in by barbed wire, like feedlot cattle, because of their pursuit of the American dream.
​And so on.

I want to give you an eloquent, deep essay connecting today to Deaf Republic.
But at this point, I think it'd do Kaminsky, and you, a disservice.
So read something.
Try Deaf Republic, an epic poem. Good for both fiction and poetry readers.
You won't regret it, but you'll feel it.

Deaf Republic does that thing.
You know, that ~thing~ New Yorker and Buzzfeed writers keep trying to say when they talk about poetry making a "resurgence in uncertain times."
That thing that leaves you with more questions and images and feelings about the world than when you came to it, slowing cracking the spine.

Power to you. Read something this month. It's national poetry month. Start here.
Namaste,
​M

 “You will find me, God / like a dumb pigeon’s beak, I am / pecking / every which way at astonishment” 

“silence moves us to speak…
soaping together
is sacred to us.
Washing each other’s shoulders.
You can fuck
anyone-- but with whom can you sit
in water?”

Bless  each thing on earth until it sickens,
until each ungovernable heart admits: I confused myself
and yet I loved-- and what I loved
I forgot, what I forgot brought glory to my travels,
to you I traveled as close as I dared, Lord.”

silence?
it is a stick I beat you with, I beat you with a stick, voice, beat you

until you speak, until you
speak right.”

“Body, they blame you for all the things and they
seek in the body what does not live in the body” 

​
m wilder
is a poet-yogi-youth librarian, found here and here,  armed with coffee, poetry books, and a lot of questions. M's words may be found puddled in paper, and in various journals too.