Poetry, Disability and Metamodernism: Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic

Based on Ilya Kaminsky’s poetry volume Deaf Republic (2019), this article aims at placing contemporary disability poetics at the crossroads of modernism and metamodernism. The first part makes an assessment of the modernist poetics of disability created against the background of the prevalent ableist ideology as it is found in the American and Romanian traditions, and examines the ways in which disabled poets react, creatively and politically, to the tradition of marginalization to which they were subjected. A particular place is given to Deaf poetry and to the limitations it had to surpass socially and creatively. In the second part of the essay, I introduce metamodern affect to sketch out a poetics of disability in the 21st century which overcomes the predicaments of modernist writing and reading codes through a new way of conceiving corporeality, oppression, and relationality.