Dancing in Odessa

by Ilya Kaminsky

Overview

Winner of the 2002 Dorset Prize, and recipient of the Ruth Lilly Fellowship, Ilya Kaminsky is a recent Russian immigrant and rising poetic star. Despite the fact that he is a non-native speaker, Kaminksy's sense of rhythm and lyic surpasses that of most contemporary poets in the English language. This magical, musical book of poems draws readers into its unforgettable heart, and Carolyn Forché wrties simply "I'm in awe of his gifts."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781932195125
Publisher:	Tupelo Press
Publication date:	04/01/2004
Pages:	58
Product dimensions:	6.75(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odessa, former Soviet Union in 1977, and arrived to the United States in 1993, when his family was granted asylum by the American government.
Dancing In Odessa (Tupelo Press, 2004) won the Whiting Writer's Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Metcalf Award, the Dorset Prize, the Ruth Lilly Fellowship given annually by Poetry magazine. Dancing In Odessa was also named Best Poetry Book of the Year 2004 by ForeWord Magazine. In 2008, Kaminsky was awarded Lannan Foundation's Literary Fellowship.
In 2009, poems from his new manuscript, Deaf Republic, were awarded Poetry magazine's Levinson Prize. Currently, he teaches Contemporary World Poetry, Creative Writing, and Literary Translation in the Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing at San Diego State University.

Table of Contents

	Author's Prayer	1
	Dancing In Odessa	3
	Musica Humana	15
	Natalia	29
	Traveling Musicians	37
	Praise	51

Editorial Reviews

"Dancing in Odessa by Ilya Kaminsky tops the list because he is one of those rarest of finds in this or any century, a writer who establishes what poetry can be." 

New York Times

Dancing in Odessa is a rich, reverberative dance with memories of a haunted city — and memory itself." 

LA Times

"Once in a rare while, if you are terribly lucky, you read a poet whose poems are so numinous, so breathtaking, whose rhythms are so full of music that you wish they could enter your body, could breathe with the lift and fall of your own breath — whose images, no matter how foreign to your own experience, enter your mind and are fixed there, changing forever your perception of the world.  Ilya Kaminsky is such a poet and his first book, Dancing in Odessa, bursts with such poems." 

Valparaiso Poetry Review