06/02/2025
Now available, Aida Zilelian's chapbook Dissonance, winner of the 2024 Swan Scythe Press Chapbook Contest!
https://www.swanscythepress.com/books/dissonance.html
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
“Aida Zilelian's artful deconstructions of her personal and familial and Armenian ancestral identities are fierce yet tender examinations that mine with imagination's hammer and sketch across time's palisades in search of answers. Inside these poems are formidable collisions of love and an undeniable desire that holds up to the light all that can disappear in a life. Dissonance is a stirring debut collection of poetry from a notable novelist deserving of recognition and rereading."
— Alan Semerdjian, author of In the Architecture of Bone, 9th poet laureate of New York's Nassau County
“Aida Zilelian, like all master wordsmiths, weaves her poems into the reader's heart—clenching it, caressing it, then letting each line, each stanza, seep into the bloodstream, disarming yet alarming with haunting images. Her heartbreak chisels away until yours begins to crack—only to mend it again. That is the power of Zilelian's voice—it doesn't just tell a story; it takes root in the heart's chambers and, like a migrant dweller seeking to create beauty, instinctively calls it home.”
— Shahé Mankerian, History of Forgetfulness
“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, author of Some Disenfranchised Evening
