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sergeant. Throughout the book, the line lengths are uneven – long then short, sometimes couplets, sometimes single words. The balance of language and white space feeds into the chaotic atmosphere; the lines themselves are flying bullets, or pieces of spit.

For his act of protest, Petya is executed, “shot in the middle of the street”, yet the hole in the body we are drawn to is Sonya, who witnesses the execution.

“Her shout a hole/ torn in the sky”. That hole becomes a prism in which we enter the old and new world of dictatorships, uprisings and conquest.

There is tenderness too; to portray Alfonso and Sonya’s love, Kaminsky contrasts the soft and quiet parts of their bodies with the imagery of war. “Your/ breasts in your hand –/ two small explosions”; “a mole on her shoulder/ …displayed like a medal for bravery”; “you step out of the shower and the entire nation calms”.

After Petya’s execution, puppeteers teach sign language to the town and “deafness, an insurgency, begins”: “Our country woke up next morning and refused to hear soldiers./ In the name of Petya, we refuse.”

Kaminsky, like me, is deaf. We met once, in Jamaica in 2016, and struggled to speak to each other at first, neither knowing the other’s sign language. He cupped his ear towards my mouth while I turned up my hearing aids and leaned in. Coincidently, that first conversation we had was about sign language. “Do you believe in silence?” he asked. In Deaf Republic, Kaminsky offers an answer: “Silence is the invention of the hearing”. Elsewhere, he writes, “silence?/ it is a stick I beat you with… beat you/ until you speak, until you/ speak right”.

There is a long history of the deaf “not speaking right” – not speaking like hearing people

– but it is not as long as the history of the hearing not listening right. As Kaminsky puts it, there are “too many ears and no one attached to them”.

Sign language is often portrayed as primitive and pantomime-esque, or ridiculed as a “non-language”, but in the pages of Deaf Republic signs become symbols of resilience and transformation. They are printed throughout the book: “Town”, for example, is illustrated as two palms facing each other, fingers touching as if to make a steeple. Speaking British Sign Language, I didn’t recognise every sign here (they are a mixture of Ukrainian, American, Russian and

Belarusian sign languages), but their presence is as charged as any written word. In Vasenka it is the authoritarian soldiers who speak the “language no one understands”.

In the last poem, “In A Time Of Peace”, Kaminsky addresses the reader in the first person, grounding us in the real world. “Inhabitant of earth for fortysomething years/ I once found myself in a peaceful country…” We might think of Kaminsky’s refugee status in the US as he goes on, “Ours is a country in which a boy shot by police lies on the pavement/ for hours”. This unidentified body could be any number of named and unnamed victims of state violence: “We see in his open mouth/ the nakedness/ of the whole nation”.

‘Our country woke up next morning and refused to hear soldiers’

Raymond Antrobus’s The Perseverance, winner of the 2019 Folio Prize, is published by Penned in the Margins

TALK TO THE HAND A 19th-century sign language chart