Dancing in Odessa.(Book Review)

From: Poetry | Date: April 1, 2005| Author: Chiasson, Dan | Copyright information

Dancing in Odessa, by Ilya Kaminsky. Tupelo Press. $16.95.

Ilya Kaminsky's Dancing in Odessa is a kind of screwball autobiography. The usual hazardous impotence of childhood was, for this poet, brutally magnified: Kaminsky and his family are Soviet emigres; Kaminsky lost most of his hearing at the age of four due to a Soviet doctor's misdiagnosis of the mumps. This is, so far as I know, the first book of poems ever written by a partly-deaf poet in a second-language he ha...