Dissonance by Aida Zilelian
Praise for Aida Zilelian’s Poetry
“Dissonance is a collection of people and place stories. Zilelian’s poetry fuses Armenian bodies, diaspora, culture, prayers, and experiences. Her imagery and language splattered with Armenian tongue and testimonio; readers see and witness, ‘An immigrant’s daughter of ravines. / And wheat fields, cadaver skies… // Black halter dress, my lips wine red,’ Zilelian scribes the violence, displacement, and survival of a people and places us in her diaspora. Dissonance represents a series of moments, Bucharest, Chelsea, the Black Sea, Sunken Meadow Beach. Zilelian gives readers truth and hope. Her collection is a ‘galaxy of consternations.’ Read Dissonance slowly, and ‘bite the sun.”’ — Allia Abdullah-Matta, Poet/Professor of English CUNY LaGuardia
“Aida Zilelian writes about beauty’s jagged edges. There are purple nails and broken tiaras among a backdrop of memory and history. Memory is universal. We all know that purse that smells of linen and spearmint gum in our grandmother’s hand. Finally, we feel what it means to be an immigrant. In one of the most stunning lines, ‘The girl unzips herself, scrambles out of her skin, running.’ Aida also speaks of moments and locations in her childhood becoming lost. These poems are an effort to recover these vivid images of food and spice, relationships, and faith. The line length varies from poem to poem, highlighting when it hurts too much to write long lines as in the poem ‘War.’ These poems sing close to the heart and to history.” — Olena Jennings, The Age of Secrets
“Dissonance is a necessary and vital chapbook of poems. Here, Aida Zilelian writes about her family—survivors of the Armenian Genocide—and about her life as an American. ‘America,’ she writes, ‘reminds you, you are an alien to your self,’ Yet despite this ‘dissonance,’ Zilelian puts forth brave and unflinching poems, poems disarming in their detail, in their fierceness, in the unique vocabulary of names, places, and emotional depths to be found in them. ‘I can find portals just about anywhere,’ Zilelian writes, and she does—in ‘the hard ache of faith,’ in ‘the cemetery of possibilities,’ in ‘the symmetry of saddness.’ ‘Is that/sad or is it what they call recovery?’ she asks. I call it brilliant. I call it hopeful. I call it the miracle of art.” — Gail Wronsky, Some Disenfranchised Evening
Aida Zilelian is a first generation American-Armenian writer, educator and storyteller from Queens, NY. She is the author of the novels All the Ways We Lied and The Legacy of Lost Things, recipient of the Tololyan Literary Award. She has been performing at storytelling events in NYC, Boston, Montreal and Los Angeles. Aida has also been featured in the Huffington Post, NPR’s Takeaway, among other reading series and print outlets. Her short story collection These Hills Were Meant for You was shortlisted for the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction and her short story “The Piano” won first prize in the Lighthouse Weekly contest. Dissonance is her first poetry chapbook. Learn more about her work by visiting aidazilelian.com
Dissonance is set to release on June 15, 2025 by Swan Scythe Press. Read an excerpt “To the Children, 1915 ” and pre-order it here.