BROKEN SONNETS WITH APOLOGY FOR SIMILE
after Ilya Kaminsky
—from Poets Respond
December 31, 2023
__________
Sophie Kaiser Rojas: “It’s the last week of 2023, and the New York Times posted their 2023 Year in Pictures. As I scrolled through their review of a year colored by global conflict, I was shocked by how, without the captions, it’s hard to tell from which of the many wars the images were taken. I also found myself needing to take a break from the article, which left me reckoning with the ease at which I clicked out of the tab. Having recently read Ukrainian poet Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic (essential reading, especially now), I’ve been thinking about the way figurative language has the potential to both embody and reduce an experience. I wrote a villanelle that I converted into a pair of sonnets, which are in dialogue with Kaminsky’s work, as well as with the specific photos and captions by Nicole Tung, Lynsey Addario, and Tyler Hicks. Their pictures document the war in the Ukraine, and they resound hauntingly in the images of the war in Gaza and other violence around the world.”
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