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Ilya Kaminsky

Ilya Kaminsky

He // Him // His

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

Portrait photo courtesy of the artist.

Poet
Atlanta, GA
2023 USA Fellow

This award was generously supported by the Mellon Foundation.
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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.

ilyakaminsky.com

[Excerpt]

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.