"when I wrote a book called The Dew Breaker, a book about a choukèt lawoze, or a Duvalier-era torturer, a book that is partly set in the period following the Numa and Drouin executions, I used an epigraph from a poem by Osip Mandelstam, who famously said, "Only in Russia is poetry respected-it gets people killed." The quotation I used is: "Maybe this is the beginning of madness.../Forgive me for what I am saying./Read it... quietly, quietly.""
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Edwidge Danticat chapter 1, "Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work"
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Osip_Mandelstam
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Osip Mandelstam
Osip Emilyevich Mandelstam (also spelled Mandelshtam; Russian: О́сип Эми́льевич Мандельшта́м; January 15, 1891 – December 27, 1938) was a Russian poet and essayist, one of the foremost members of the Acmeist school of poets.
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