Dancing in Odessa - Softcover

"Like Joseph Brodsky before him, Kaminsky is a terrifyingly good poet, another poet from the former U.S.S.R. who, having adopted English, has come to put us native speakers to shame... It seemed to take about five minutes to read this book, and when I began again, I reached the end before I was ready. That's how compulsive, how propulsive it is to read. It wraps you in a world created by a new and wonderful poet." --The Philadelphia Inquirer "With his magical style in English, poems in Dancing In Odessa seem like a literary counterpart to Chagall in which laws of gravity have been suspended and colors reassigned, but only to make everyday reality that much more indelible. His imagination is so transformative that we respond with equal measures of grief and exhilaration." --American Academy of Arts and Letters Citation for Metcalf Award "Ilya Kaminsky's poems are sometimes deliriously happy and sometimes full of horror, but they are always immense in their ideas and their reach." --The Jerusalem Post "Dancing in Odessa is a rich, reverberative dance with memories of a haunted city -- and memory itself: "letters with a child's signature, a raspberry, a page of sky." --Carol Muske-Dukes, Los Angeles Times

Surreal enough to be true, these poems waltz through encounters within families and without. The people depicted are in equal measure brutal and tender, in narratives that are strangely innocent, compelling and convincing. The poems draw on archetype and myth, as well as Russian literary figures, in tightly realised domestic settings that invigorate them with a contemporary relevance, with humour and torment, and, all the while, music.