Overview

A collection of poems and photographs that take the foothills of Vermont's Green Mountains as a microcosm for considering climate change, borders, and community life. In Dissonance, translator Kristin Dykstra's first book of original poetry, the author leads us to inner worlds shaped partly by the New England countryside, tracking shifts in the region's nature, infrastructure, and people, while sharing observations on borders and climate catastrophe that reverberate globally. Dykstra condenses signs of urban expansion, economic division, and battles over democracy into an innovative meditation. With a dynamic approach to form, musicality, and scope, Dissonance explores ways of experiencing regional landscapes and imagined communities in the twenty-first century. Through her extended sequence of prose poems, photographs, and lyric fragments, Dykstra merges clips from documents and dialogues with observations drawn from two local libraries and her daily walks down a dirt road through Vermont's foothills. As she moves down this public road, which lies within the nation's federally designated hundred-mile border zone, she finds a daily convergence of tensions. Dissonance asks how poetry can unsettle impressions of a place, and how that process, in turn, disturbs impressions of self, of others, and of time itself. Dissonance is the recipient of the third annual Phoenix Emerging Poet Book Prize.

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9780226840314

Table of Contents

Reviews

“In Dissonance—over four sections of tightly calibrated and still, nigh ghostlike stanzas that drift, seemingly estranged, apart from each other—place is slowly disarticulated from presence, even as the ligatures between the concrete and the abstract grow more taut. That such musicality plays a strong role in the direct syntax of Dissonance’s poetics is a demonstration of precise control and calibration. One can find vivid depth on any given page of Dissonance, with drama at a level of the lived experience of the humans often just outside of frame.” -- Douglas Kearney, Phoenix Poets contributing editor and author of ""Optic Subwoof"" “Dykstra’s Dissonance is a beautiful and powerful book of musical and visual poems about how life survives the endless ways in which the earth and time and our conceptions of the cosmic are out of balance. Overblown electrical grids, floods, dying animals: I recognize the apocalypse in these poems, yet I am endlessly surprised and stunned by Dykstra’s magnification of the formal qualities of the local (mud, roads, hills). With lightness and rigor, the present and absent music of Dissonance hauntingly asks us to imagine the ways in which our bodies and the collective body have been partitioned, borderized and circumscribed by the nation, its rhetoric and dissolution. The world of these poems is magic and sickness, disappearance, regeneration, contradiction and counter-diction amid the grief of capital and the crumbling architecture of the anthropocene."" -- Daniel Borzutzky, author of ""Murmuring Grief of the Americas"" “Dissonance is an inspired, affective meditation on landscape and longing, the horizons of home in a time of emergency. Voices of the dead so murmur their petition as to cast the living, now self-estranged, into forms that quicken, ache, and bewilder. With remarkable insight, Dykstra’s poetry of thought—of variable cadence and mood—refutes the foreboding of cataclysm as witnessed in the thick material of the present—in mud, the correlative of mind, substance subject to change, akin to the temperament of hope, overturning, remaking.” -- Roberto Tejada, author of ""Why the Assembly Disbanded"" “In Dissonance, Dykstra offers us a nervy everywhere, as a year of seasons in the mountains of Vermont. Its poems and texts deftly trace a language that never settles into ease. Hers is a lush yet lucid dissonance, differing but never deferring, a pastoral inhabited and undone, where commerce and vehicles, borders,  fighter jets, deportations, inundations, are never far. An eeriness prevails. An attendance to what might arrive. Time, and light.” -- Erín Moure, author of ""The Elements""

Included in Prepub Preview | A Year of Titles To Watch * Library Journal * ""The book reminds us that roads—like most divisions—are human constructions.  . . . One of the great joys of Dissonance is its blending of form and function, the way Dykstra’s poems forego lineation to resist notions of what lines should do. . . . Dykstra’s brilliant Dissonance is an aesthetically beautiful and timely book that speaks directly to our times while providing fodder well beyond this current moment . . . the book overall merges political and aesthetic purposes in a powerful way. Just as Shklovsky asked, Dykstra quite intentionally chooses the peripheral over any predetermined path, and she invites us to do the same."" * Another Chicago Magazine * ""Rooted in the foothills of Vermont, the prose poems and fragments here hold a foreboding sense of surveillance. Dykstra is attuned the to the borderline, to boundaries fluid and enforced, to the jagged distance that sometimes collapses in its conjured arbitrariness."" -- Nina MacLaughlin * New England Literary News * “Dykstra’s Dissonance is a beautiful and powerful book of musical and visual poems about how life survives the endless ways in which the earth and time and our conceptions of the cosmic are out of balance. Overblown electrical grids, floods, dying animals: I recognize the apocalypse in these poems, yet I am endlessly surprised and stunned by Dykstra’s magnification of the formal qualities of the local (mud, roads, hills). With lightness and rigor, the present and absent music of Dissonance hauntingly asks us to imagine the ways in which our bodies and the collective body have been partitioned, borderized and circumscribed by the nation, its rhetoric and dissolution. The world of these poems is magic and sickness, disappearance, regeneration, contradiction and counter-diction amid the grief of capital and the crumbling architecture of the anthropocene."" -- Daniel Borzutzky, author of ""Murmuring Grief of the Americas"" “In Dissonance—over four sections of tightly calibrated and still, nigh ghostlike stanzas that drift, seemingly estranged, apart from each other—place is slowly disarticulated from presence, even as the ligatures between the concrete and the abstract grow more taut. That such musicality plays a strong role in the direct syntax of Dissonance’s poetics is a demonstration of precise control and calibration. One can find vivid depth on any given page of Dissonance, with drama at a level of the lived experience of the humans often just outside of frame.” -- Douglas Kearney, Phoenix Poets contributing editor and author of ""Optic Subwoof"" “Dissonance is an inspired, affective meditation on landscape and longing, the horizons of home in a time of emergency. Voices of the dead so murmur their petition as to cast the living, now self-estranged, into forms that quicken, ache, and bewilder. With remarkable insight, Dykstra’s poetry of thought—of variable cadence and mood—refutes the foreboding of cataclysm as witnessed in the thick material of the present—in mud, the correlative of mind, substance subject to change, akin to the temperament of hope, overturning, remaking.” -- Roberto Tejada, author of ""Carbonate of Copper"" “In Dissonance, Dykstra offers us a nervy everywhere, as a year of seasons in the mountains of Vermont. Its poems and texts deftly trace a language that never settles into ease. Hers is a lush yet lucid dissonance, differing but never deferring, a pastoral inhabited and undone, where commerce and vehicles, borders,  fighter jets, deportations, inundations, are never far. An eeriness prevails. An attendance to what might arrive. Time, and light.” -- Erín Moure, author of ""The Elements""

Author Information

Kristin Dykstra is a writer, literary translator, and scholar living in Hinesburg, VT. Dykstra has translated numerous books, including works by Cuban writers Reina María Rodríguez, Juan Carlos Flores, Marcelo Morales, Rito Ramón Aroche, Ángel Escobar, and Omar Pérez. Among her honors are the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Literary Translation. Her writing has been published in the Chicago Review, Guernica, Hopkins Review, Lana Turner, Asymptote, Latin American Literature Today, Rumpus, Astra, and elsewhere. Dissonance is her first original poetry collection.  

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