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"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"--
About the author
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.
