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Dissonance
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.
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.
- GenresPoetry
93 pages, Paperback
Published March 12, 2025
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June 12, 2025
If you were to map a poem, or you were to lay a poem over a map, so you could see the contours and roadways beneath the paper. So, if it were a map of the foothills, where you’re living, or you’ve been transplanted to, you could write observations about what this place feels like. Because though this paper overlaying the map is opaque, there is something about the place, the objective view of the place, that you, the poet, can see while you’re writing. That’s the poetry of Dykstra’s book. The awareness of place, the commitment to accuracy, like a map is accurate, and the natural, observational statement a map makes. Especially how a poet observes the world, how a poet hears their observations, like it were a poem.
But the poems in Dystra’s book are barely trying to be poems. Which might be one of their most interesting and endearing qualities. They are records of what would happen on any given Day. Where Day is the formal 24-hour measure of a day, but it could be any day. But frame it in your mind as a Day. Like it’s chronicling a Day. Like if you’ve ever read through the Old Testament books of Chronicles, they have this commitment to History, shaping facts so History is revealed to favor this one patriarchal line. I understand me writing that the Bible is focused on seeing the world through a set lens shouldn’t be news to anyone; however, the idea that History is the equivalent to a commemorative coin, where the coin’s engravings would serve as chronicles that substantiate this History, this is the concept I’m pursuing. Because History to commemorative coin is not an exact match to Day to Dykstra’s book of poems. But the equivalence does help for understanding an artistic use of abbreviation. The formal term I’m elaborating on is metonymy, of course. Where Day in Dykstra’s poems stands in for all the things that might happen during any given day, and taken individually they might not seem all that significant, but woven together, they are this place.
Like if you could experience each of these observations, and know exactly where on the map they occurred, you would gain a profound understanding of this place. I prefer reading Dykstra’s poems as though she were a transplant to these foothills rather than someone native to them, mainly because I get hear this displacement in many of the observations. Like she only mildly belongs to this place. And that could be part of the “dissonance” identified by the title.
I’m a bit more confident, however, that the “dissonance” registered by the title is directed more at the Anthropocene. Specifically, being in a world that keeps evidencing its occupation by humans. Their sounds. Their human figures populating the land. Their marks on the land lasting long past them. And Dykstra is the poet who recognizes these marks as mere marks, what a single human does, each of these single instances had no intention of being gathered with other marks to form a sustained body of evidence. And then Dykstra’s poems did the gathering. Dissonance posing each mark in both their singularity and their accumulative nature. Like I said at the opening to this review, you weren’t supposed to see the map these poems are overlaying. And yet the map feels present. Like maps as inclination. Like premonition, but you’re recording all the feelings while you are conscious of future implications imprinting on your mind. But where is your mind when you make statements that are mere observations.
But the poems in Dystra’s book are barely trying to be poems. Which might be one of their most interesting and endearing qualities. They are records of what would happen on any given Day. Where Day is the formal 24-hour measure of a day, but it could be any day. But frame it in your mind as a Day. Like it’s chronicling a Day. Like if you’ve ever read through the Old Testament books of Chronicles, they have this commitment to History, shaping facts so History is revealed to favor this one patriarchal line. I understand me writing that the Bible is focused on seeing the world through a set lens shouldn’t be news to anyone; however, the idea that History is the equivalent to a commemorative coin, where the coin’s engravings would serve as chronicles that substantiate this History, this is the concept I’m pursuing. Because History to commemorative coin is not an exact match to Day to Dykstra’s book of poems. But the equivalence does help for understanding an artistic use of abbreviation. The formal term I’m elaborating on is metonymy, of course. Where Day in Dykstra’s poems stands in for all the things that might happen during any given day, and taken individually they might not seem all that significant, but woven together, they are this place.
Like if you could experience each of these observations, and know exactly where on the map they occurred, you would gain a profound understanding of this place. I prefer reading Dykstra’s poems as though she were a transplant to these foothills rather than someone native to them, mainly because I get hear this displacement in many of the observations. Like she only mildly belongs to this place. And that could be part of the “dissonance” identified by the title.
I’m a bit more confident, however, that the “dissonance” registered by the title is directed more at the Anthropocene. Specifically, being in a world that keeps evidencing its occupation by humans. Their sounds. Their human figures populating the land. Their marks on the land lasting long past them. And Dykstra is the poet who recognizes these marks as mere marks, what a single human does, each of these single instances had no intention of being gathered with other marks to form a sustained body of evidence. And then Dykstra’s poems did the gathering. Dissonance posing each mark in both their singularity and their accumulative nature. Like I said at the opening to this review, you weren’t supposed to see the map these poems are overlaying. And yet the map feels present. Like maps as inclination. Like premonition, but you’re recording all the feelings while you are conscious of future implications imprinting on your mind. But where is your mind when you make statements that are mere observations.
Displaying 1 of 1 review