Mute: The Fifteenth Anniversary Edition.
Raymond Luczak.
110 pages.
4 x 6 trade paperback.
ISBN: 978-1-941960-19-6
$18.00

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Raymond Luczak is the author and editor of 38 books, including The Language of Home: Stories (Gallaudet University Press, 2025), Animals Out-There W-i-l-d: A Bestiary in English and ASL Gloss (Unbound Edition Press, 2024), Oh Yeah: A Bear Poetry Anthology (Bearskin Lodge Press, 2024), and A Quiet Foghorn: More Notes from a Deaf Gay Life (Gallaudet University Press, 2022). Prior to becoming the acquisitions editor for the Yooper Poetry Series, he edited Yooper Poetry: On Experiencing Michigan's Upper Peninsula (Modern History Press, 2024). His next title will be [Exeunt.] (Beauty School Editions, 2026). His work has appeared in Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. A multiple Pushcart Prize nominee and an inaugural Zoeglossia Poetry Fellow, Raymond Luczak lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Do not be afraid of your face.
Move into a beam of light
in the bar. Smile openly.
Watch his hands move
quicker than strobe lights
as he surveys the crowd with his friends.
Do not think of how hard
it might be to have a casual
conversation.

When he comes across the floor,
do not ask his name with
exaggerated lip movements.
A simple "How are you" will do ...

—"How to Fall for a Deaf Man, 2025"

Silence is always a powerful statement, but even more so in this third poetry collection by Raymond Luczak, now expanded with an introduction and thirteen new poems that include elegies for his Deaf gay friends. First published in 2010, Mute explored what it was like to navigate the warring languages of confusion and clarity.

As a Deaf gay man in the hearing world, Luczak lends an unforgettable voice to this reality of ache and loss beyond the inadequate translation of sound.


Praise for the original edition of Mute

Luczak explores the conflicts and collisions with the hearing world as an unavoidable part of a Deaf person’s everyday navigation, and he does so with sensitivity though he’s honest about the frustrations and challenges to one’s patience. In the poem “Waiting for You to Learn Sign Language,” there’s even a bit of an incentive: “Love, open your hands. You are a corked geyser.” Being Deaf offers this gay poet (and his beloved) access to a unique communication and landscape of tactile metaphors that enriches the poetry on the page. —Rigoberto González, Lambda Literary Review

I’ll be honest: The opening poem of Mute entitled “How to Fall for a Deaf Man” is so achingly beautiful that it actually made me cry. That’s no easy feat, yet Luczak’s lines are so tender and insightful that they cut to the heart of the matter and invite you to read and re-read them, over and over. ... His words transgress the hearing world, laying bare its prejudices. There is an undeniable sorrow here, an achingly haunted world that Luczak bravely guides the reader through, one filled with moments of blistering love and undeniable mystery. Perfect for lovers of language. —Scott-Patrick Mitchell, Out in Perth

Sexual politics rears its head in Raymond Luczak’s wonderful Mute, exploring themes that elucidate what it’s like to walk between the hearing and Deaf worlds. Luczak negotiates this path between spheres with ease, his language reflecting the pain and experience that purchased his facility (“Waiting for You to Learn Sign Language,” “One Day When I Lose My Speech”) and inform those pieces that are not about deafness at all (“Night Stroll in Washington D.C.,” “The Loom”). Luczak is a powerful poet whose work is as important as it is beautiful. —Jerry Wheeler, Out in Print

Beautiful and elegant, Luczak’s poetry hits the reader with a slap across the face. —Amos Lassen, who listed Mute as the third best book of 2010

Mute is a book about communication—or the possibility of it. Using print as a medium, Luczak tries to negotiate that terrain in which spoken language is not an option (or is, at best, a very poor one) and the written word will not suffice. Unlike poets whose major purpose in writing is to “express themselves,” Luczak has constituency for whom he is speaking. Thus, his work is not mute at all. This is not to say that Luczak is a mouthpiece for either the Deaf or gay communities. His life and poetry is much too idiosyncratic for that. He does, however, give readers a pictures of a slice of society, the Deaf gay culture, that they are not likely to encounter in many other volumes of poetry. As this body of literature grows, Mute is likely to have an important place in it. —Michael Northen, Wordgathering

You can check out new poems such as "Uncloseting, 1984" and "Later," and old poems such as "Hearing Your Voice for the First Time," Instructions to Hearing Persons Desiring a Deaf Man," and "Orphans." The trailer for the first edition of Mute is right here on his YouTube channel!