Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky

 Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky-80 pages

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This is an interesting, thought-provoking collection of poems. It tells a story of a town being ravished by war and bombardment. The town goes deaf and deafness is seen as an illness. Many townspeople are killed and some fight back against the soldiers. Some soldiers are killed, but those who resist them are killed in retaliation. I picked this up because of a line in the book "The deaf don't believe in silence. Silence is the invention of the hearing." The entire collection of poems provokes pondering the meaning of being hearing and being deaf and what it means to resist oppression.