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

"Dissonance toys with the tensions between independence and interdependence that mark the history of Vermont and New Hampshire. . . . In the foothills of Dykstra’s poem, grammatical caesurae break up any sense of character, replacing it with figuration: 'figure' and 'solitary figure.' It is the same kind of anonymity that we are all, to some degree, acclimated to in the internet age, but, in a topographical act, this anonymity is mapped back onto topos, place."

Literary Matters

"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

“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 "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"