reviewed by Laura Eve Engel

Convulsing under the occupation of an unnamed, oppressive military force, the inhabitants of the fictional town of Vasenka have all suddenly lost their hearing after a deaf boy is shot and left to die: “Ours is a country in which a boy shot by police lies on the pavement / for hours.” Immediately in dialogue with the frequently invoked passage from Pastor Martin Niemöller, “First they came for the socialists,” Ilya Kaminsky’s breathtaking second collection, a highconcept interrogation of individual and civic response to political upheaval and collective action, opens with these lines: “And when they bombed other people’s houses, we // protested / but not enough, we opposed them but not // enough.” Challenging and deepening the arguably oversimple silence-as-ambivalence paradigm suggested by Niemöller, here deafness and silence are figured not as impotence but as fierce protest, if at times a crushing burden, where “the voice we cannot hear—is the clearest voice.” and “The sound we do not hear lifts the gulls off the water.” The townspeople around which this two-act story unfolds enact their grief in ways that will resonate painfully with any tuned-in American: “We see in his open mouth / the nakedness / of a whole nation. // [...] The body of a boy lies on the pavement exactly like the body of a boy.” Illustrations of words and phrases in sign language punctuate the book’s pages and offer the reader a visual experience of power, insisting on silence as consequence, as action, and as openness: “What is silence? Something of the sky in us.”

This review originally appeared in the Books Noted section of American Poets, Spring-Summer 2019.