The closed captions for this are terrible! Here is my transcript: "Well, DEAF REPUBLIC begins in a moment at the public gathering during a time of crisis, when a pregnant woman and her husband which soldiers shoot and kill a young deaf boy. In response to that murder, basically the whole town decides to protest the authorities by refusing to hear them. And that protest is coordinated by sign language. The book is about many things. I am a refugee from former USSR, from Ukraine. And that book obviously speaks to that part of my life. But I have also lived in the United States for many years at the border between the United States and Mexico so the book certainly speaks to that part of my life as well. I also happen to be a hard-of-hearing person. In the introduction to her great text EXTRAORDINARY BODIES disability scholar Rosemarie Garland Thomson says that the disabled body should move from the realm of the hospital room to the realm of political minority. So the book is very much in conversation with that as well. Obviously the book is about crisis...and we are, both here in this country--in the U.S.--and in many other places at the moment, are in severe crisis. But it seems like everything around us is trying to amplify the crisis, that capitalism is trying to make money on it and to make us buy things. And the book is also kind of trying to put itself in tension with that by offering moments of tenderness because so much suffering is amplified in the daily news all the time--but who and what are we amplifying our tenderness? When I lived in the USSR--I come [sic] to America when I was 16--I didn’t really have hearing aids. So the Russian I knew in one way or another was very much a language of silence. And when I began to write in English--I realized it later, after my first book DANCING IN ODESSA was published--that image is my main device. It’s as if I am trying to make poetry entirely out of images. In DEAF REPUBLIC I try to complicate it a little more. There are nursery rhymes, there are lullabies, love songs--by going to the very roots of English, say Mother Goose rhymes. At the same time the book wants to speak on more than one range of language. It wants to provide a story but to remain lyrical in a sphere so that prose poems or prose text, there is verse with line breaks, there is also parallel language, sign language, which tries to tell the story of the book itself. And signs are very important for me because I want the reader of the book to be implicated in the story of the book. As the book proceeds the reader begins to know the signs without me having to tell them what the signs stand for. And my hope is that the book learns [teaches] not just the language of signs but the language of the story."
![OsamaSon - ik what you did last summer [Official Music Video]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/4DIQDnu3mr4/mqdefault.jpg)
The closed captions for this are terrible! Here is my transcript:
"Well, DEAF REPUBLIC begins in a moment at the public gathering during a time of crisis, when a pregnant woman and her husband which soldiers shoot and kill a young deaf boy. In response to that murder, basically the whole town decides to protest the authorities by refusing to hear them. And that protest is coordinated by sign language.
The book is about many things. I am a refugee from former USSR, from Ukraine. And that book obviously speaks to that part of my life. But I have also lived in the United States for many years at the border between the United States and Mexico so the book certainly speaks to that part of my life as well.
I also happen to be a hard-of-hearing person. In the introduction to her great text EXTRAORDINARY BODIES disability scholar Rosemarie Garland Thomson says that the disabled body should move from the realm of the hospital room to the realm of political minority. So the book is very much in conversation with that as well.
Obviously the book is about crisis...and we are, both here in this country--in the U.S.--and in many other places at the moment, are in severe crisis. But it seems like everything around us is trying to amplify the crisis, that capitalism is trying to make money on it and to make us buy things. And the book is also kind of trying to put itself in tension with that by offering moments of tenderness because so much suffering is amplified in the daily news all the time--but who and what are we amplifying our tenderness?
When I lived in the USSR--I come [sic] to America when I was 16--I didn’t really have hearing aids. So the Russian I knew in one way or another was very much a language of silence. And when I began to write in English--I realized it later, after my first book DANCING IN ODESSA was published--that image is my main device. It’s as if I am trying to make poetry entirely out of images. In DEAF REPUBLIC I try to complicate it a little more. There are nursery rhymes, there are lullabies, love songs--by going to the very roots of English, say Mother Goose rhymes. At the same time the book wants to speak on more than one range of language. It wants to provide a story but to remain lyrical in a sphere so that prose poems or prose text, there is verse with line breaks, there is also parallel language, sign language, which tries to tell the story of the book itself. And signs are very important for me because I want the reader of the book to be implicated in the story of the book. As the book proceeds the reader begins to know the signs without me having to tell them what the signs stand for. And my hope is that the book learns [teaches] not just the language of signs but the language of the story."
What a brave and beautiful thing to do to share such amazing work through poetry !