"Once in a rare while, if you are terribly lucky, you read a poet whose poems are so numinous, so breathtaking, whose rhythms are so full of music that you wish they could enter your body, could breathe with the lift and fall of your own breath — whose images, no matter how foreign to your own experience, enter your mind and are fixed there, changing forever your perception of the world.  Ilya Kaminsky is such a poet and his first book, Dancing in Odessa, bursts with such poems." 

Valparaiso Poetry Review

“Dancing in Odessa is a rich, reverberative dance with memories of a haunted city -- and memory itself." 

LA Times

"Dancing in Odessa by Ilya Kaminsky tops the list because he is one of those rarest of finds in this or any century, a writer who establishes what poetry can be." 

New York Times