Deaf Republic by
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.
Country of Glass
Country of Glass is the debut poetry collection from Sarah Katz, who offers an exploration of the concept of precariousness as it applies to bodies, families, countries, and whole societies. Katz employs themes of illness, disability, war, and survival within the contexts of family history and global historical events. The collection moves through questions about identity, storytelling, displacement, and trauma, constructing an overall narrative about what it means to love while trying to survive. The poems in this book--which take the form of free verse, prose poems, sestinas, and erasures--attempt to address human fragility and what resilience looks like in a world where so much is uncertain.
A Babble of Objects
If objects could talk, what sort of things would they say? Through a rapid-series of short poems Raymond Luczak, author of seven acclaimed poetry collections such as Mute (A Midsummer Night's Press) and The Kiss of Walt Whitman Still on My Lips (Squares & Rebels), imagines the inner lives of inanimate objects. We learn what it's like to be a dressing room mirror, a bobby pin, a discarded mattress, a stapler, a credit card, a hearing aid, and a bagful of marbles among other things.
How to Kill Poetry
With the ghosts of Emily Dickinson, Arthur Rimbaud, Sappho, and Walt Whitman leading the way, How to Kill Poetry showcases a highly selective overview of Western civilization’s poetic development from its oral traditions to the silence of pixels. The narrative then jumps 200 years into the future where the unfortunate consequences of global warming create a dramatic backdrop against which poetry—if it is to have any redeeming value—must survive.
Mute
Poetry. LGBT Studies. Silence is always a powerful statement, but even more so in the hands of Raymond Luczak, who demonstrates in his third collection what it's like to navigate between the warring languages of confusion and clarity. As a deaf gay man in the hearing world, he lends an unforgettable voice to his reality of ache and loss beyond the inadequate translation of sound.
Once upon a Twin by
When Raymond Luczak was growing up deaf in a hearing Catholic family of nine children, his mother shared conflicting stories about having had a miscarriage after--or possibly around--the time he was conceived. As an elegy to his lost twin, this book asks: If he had a twin, just how different would his life have been?
Road Work Ahead by
Poetry. LGBT Studies. In the follow-up to his critically acclaimed collection MUTE, Raymond Luczak sets out on a turbulent journey after ending a 15-year relationship. The poems of ROAD WORK AHEAD follow Luczak as he meets kindred souls on his travels and wonders what it means to love again. He opens the suitcase of his heart in far-flung cities and points beyond. His poems, pungent with musk and ache, will open yours too.
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