I've never really loved poetry. I know, all you literature lovers out there are probably going to hunt me down and lock me in the English department dungeon for saying that. It's not that I don't enjoy poetry when I read it. Over the past couple of years, I've come to appreciate poetry much more; the way the words flow and spill over each other, the simplicity in its mystery. But I don't know all the major poets, I don't have any poems memorized, and I don't own any tomes of poetry.
But there is a very thin book on my bookshelf that stands apart from the Shakespeare, Austen, Dickens, and Bronte:
Dancing In Odessa by
Ilya Kaminsky.
Ilya Kaminsky--young, modern, Ukrainian, and deaf--seems like the last person who would be a teenage girl's first favorite poet. In fact, when I first read the book, he wasn't. The poems were just a class assignment, not anything to write home about. But then I got to see him read, and everything changed.
