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Abstract

This paper examines sleep and bodily stillness in Aman Rakhmetov’s poetry collection Человек засыпает и становится фотографией (“A Person Falls Asleep and Becomes a Photograph”). In these poems, sleep is not simply rest but a state of vulnerability and suspension. Music appears only in solitude and in the horizontal position of the bed; poetry is described as bordering on insomnia; and the sleeping person becomes a photograph: still, visible, and freed from performance. Wakefulness, by contrast, is figured as something cinematic and staged.

Several poems also circulate as Instagram Reels created by the poet. In these videos, slow gestures, background music, and editing reshape the poems’ intimacy and address, turning private reverie into a mediated encounter with viewers. By reading the printed poems alongside their digital versions, this paper asks how contemporary Kazakh poetry negotiates stillness, exposure, and performance across page and visual media platforms.