Event date: April 29, 2025
Event Time: 06:30 PM – 08:00 PM
Description:
For National Poetry Month, we will read Deaf Republic: Poems by Ilya Kaminsky. The story 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.
This parable in poems 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 Deaf Republic confronts our time’s vicious atrocities and our collective silence in the face of them.
Books will be available at the Atrium, or read it on the Libby or Palace Project app.
English (United States)