The opening poem of Ilya Kaminsky’s second collection, Deaf Republic, is titled “We Lived Happily During the War.” That title also serves as the opening line of the poem, and this the opening line of the book, and because the first word is “we,” Kaminsky is making the reader a part of the experience of the book and its narrative. The poem makes that clear in the early lines, which read “And when they bombed other people’s houses, we // protested / but not enough, we opposed them but not // enough.” The speaker of the poem switches to “I” for the next four lines, but comes back to the collective speaker at the end, with a long sentence that ends “we (forgive us) // lived happily during the war.” It’s a powerful rhetorical strategy for a poet to use, that first person plural that does more than invite the reader to engage with the work, but rather incorporates them into it, to be a part of the narrative rather than an observer of it, especially when there’s a taste of moral judgment included in that “(forgive us).”

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