In another poet’s hands, Kaminsky’s story would have been an occasion for memoir. He writes poems full of surprising extrapolations of meaning based on partial or fragmentary perception. - Jeannine Hall Gailey, The Pedestal Magazine
I am looking forward to reading more of Kaminsky’s work in the future. I am constantly reminded in reading this book of Voltaire: ‘Life is a comedy for those who think, and a tragedy for those who feel.’ This is poetry that walk a tightrope between edification and entertainment, between suffering and enlightened laughter. Dancing in Odessa is a collection full with ambition, intelligence, and passion well constructed with humor, whimsicality, and unrelenting desire for truth. Beneath the narratives of the poems themselves is an underlying spirituality. This collection cannot help but make a statement about humanity, and not a simplistic one, but a realistic, morally, and politically informed one, about how human beings overcome evil and hardship. This scope resists the smallness of mind that seems to infect so many current books of poetry, the inwardness, dullness, and misery. His scope is not limited to himself, it is sweeping-it includes not only his family, but also an imagining of other writers and people. Kaminsky has lines that are howlingly funny next to lines of unspeakable horror his invocations of romantic love are brave and sometimes goofy, just like the real thing. Writing in his non-native tongue, he possesses a magical ability to make words we have grown tired of fresh again. Dancing in Odessa is an amazing collection….Kaminsky expands the idea of what American poetry can do.
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