The Harrisburg Book Festival is honored to host award-winning poets Ilya Kaminsky and Katie Farris for a poetry reading and signing on their new collections, Deaf Republic (Kaminsky) and Standing in the Forest of Being Alive (Farris). This event will take place at the Midtown Scholar Bookstore.
This event is free and open to the public; no registration required. Seating is general admission; first come, first served. A book signing will immediately follow the conversation. Purchase of the author’s new book from the Midtown Scholar Bookstore is required for entry to the signing line.
About the Books:
Deaf Republic opens in an occupied country in a time of political unrest. When soldiers breaking up a protest kill a deaf boy, Petya, the gunshot becomes the last thing the citizens hear―they all have gone deaf, and their dissent becomes coordinated by sign language. The story follows the private lives of townspeople encircled by public violence: a newly married couple, Alfonso and Sonya, expecting a child; the brash Momma Galya, instigating the insurgency from her puppet theater; and Galya’s girls, heroically teaching signing by day and by night luring soldiers one by one to their deaths behind the curtain. At once a love story, an elegy, and an urgent plea, Ilya Kaminsky’s long-awaited Deaf Republic confronts our time’s vicious atrocities and our collective silence in the face of them.
Standing in the Forest of Being Alive is a memoir-in-poems that reckons with erotic love even as the narrator is diagnosed and treated for breast cancer at the age of thirty-six during a time of pandemic and political upheaval. With humor and honesty, the book portrays both the pleasures and the horrors of the lover, the citizen, and the medical subject. How can we find, in the midst of hell, what isn’t hell? And whom can we tell how much we want to live? An intimate, hilarious and devastating look into some of the most private moments of a life―even if they happen to occur in a medical office with six strangers looking on. This book is for anyone who's ever asked how to live in the face of suffering, and doesn't expect an easy answer. Standing in the Forest of Being Alive looks unflinchingly at painful realities, posing the question "What isn't hell?" and finds the answer in a powerful eros, letting a loved one pull laughter out of the narrator's reluctant mouth like a "redvioletcerulean handkerchief."
About the Authors:
Ilya Kaminsky was born in the former Soviet Union and is now an American citizen. He is the author of a previous poetry collection, Dancing in Odessa, and coeditor of The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry. He has received a Whiting Award, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and was named a finalist for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages.
Katie Farris' work appears in The Nation, The Atlantic Monthly, McSweeneys, Granta, The Believer, Poetry, Poetry London, American Poetry Review and has been commissioned by MoMA. Her poems have received Pushcart Prize, The Beloit Poetry Journal's Chad Walsh Prize, and Anne Halley Poetry Prize, given by The Massachusetts Review. She is the author of the chapbook, A Net to Catch My Body in its Weaving (Beloit Poetry Journal) and boysgirls (Tupelo Press), a hybrid-form book, as well as co-translator of many books of poetry. Her own writing has been translated into numerous languages, including French, Ukrainian, Spanish and Russian. Standing in the Forest of Being Alive (Alice James Books) is her first collection of poetry.
