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A person wearing rimless glasses and a purple sweater sits in front of a stone wall looking slightly away from the camera.

Photo courtesy of the artist.

Artists

Ilya Kaminsky

He // Him // His

Poet

Atlanta, Georgia

Ilya Kaminsky is the author of Deaf Republic (Graywolf Press) and Dancing In Odessa (Tupelo Press). Kaminsky is also a cotranslator of Dark Elderberry Branch: Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva (Alice James Books) and coeditor of Ecco Anthology of International Poetry (Harper Collins). He has received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and has been a finalist for the National Book Award. Kaminsky’s books have been translated into over twenty languages.

Donor -This award was generously supported by the Mellon Foundation.

This artist page was last updated on: 08.26.2024

"Author's Prayer"

If I speak for the dead, I must leave
this animal of my body,


I must write the same poem over and over,
for an empty page is the white flag of their surrender.


If I speak for them, I must walk on the edge
of myself, I must live as a blind man


who runs through rooms without
touching the furniture.


Yes, I live. I can cross the streets asking "What year is it?"
I can dance in my sleep and laugh


in front of the mirror.
Even sleep is a prayer, Lord,


I will praise your madness, and
in a language not mine, speak


of music that wakes us, music
in which we move. For whatever I say


is a kind of petition, and the darkest
days must I praise.

Poem by Ilya Kaminsky.

"Dancing in Odessa"

 

We lived north of the future, days opene

letters with a child's signature, a raspberry, a page of sky.

 

 

My grandmother threw tomatoes

from her balcony, she pulled imagination like a blanket

over my head. I painted

my mother's face. She understood

loneliness, hid the dead in the earth like partisans.

 

 

The night undressed us (I counted

its pulse) my mother danced, she filled the past

with peaches, casseroles. At this, my doctor laughed, his granddaughter

touched my eyelid—I kissed

 

 

the back of her knee. The city trembled,

a ghost-ship setting sail.

And my classmate invented twenty names for Jew.

He was an angel, he had no name,

we wrestled, yes. My grandfathers fought

 

 

the German tanks on tractors, I kept a suitcase full

of Brodsky’s poems. The city trembled,

a ghost-ship setting sail.

At night, I woke to whisper: yes, we lived.

We lived, yes, don’t say it was a dream.

 

 

At the local factory, my father

took a handful of snow, put it in my mouth.

The sun began a routine narration,

whitening their bodies: mother, father dancing, moving

as the darkness spoke behind them.

It was April. The sun washed the balconies, April.

 

 

I retell the story the light etches

into my hand: Little book, go to the city without me.

Poem by Ilya Kaminsky.