Grief and Hope in the Poetry of Dissonance

Dissonance, poems by Aida Zilelian
Swan Scythe Press 2025
ISBN 9781930454552

Dissonance, Aida Zilelian’s first chapbook of poetry, contains the songs of a first-generation American of Armenian heritage. Zilelian is a novelist from Queens, New York, and her poetry emerges from the history of the Armenian diaspora, using disharmonies to document diasporic life in New York City. 

The book begins in 1915 with wheelbarrows of bones: 

Limbs are fragments multiplied by a century
of Arams and Aghavnees playing
at the foot of apricot trees. Keghams and Silvas.
If we could gather all the souls, the steepest ravine would replenish
the sky until it reached a hemisphere we would 
have to invent.
They are all among us, petals shedding, the pull of seasons
promising their return. Eyes and throat, the breath of lambs
in a creeping field.
(“To the Children, 1915”)

“To the Children, 1915” is a memorial to the Armenian Genocide of 1915, and amid the rubble of a mass grave, Zilelian names the anonymous and gives the dead new lives across geography and time. For this poet, those who perished in the genocide exist in multiple states and tenses: they are gone, dismembered, fragmented; they are also remembered, multiplied, here among us, set to return. The dead’s multidimensional existence speaks to a paradox that dissonance sounds out, a paradox central to Zilelian’s book: absence sustains presence. What is lost somehow remains. 

Throughout Dissonance, Zilelian strikes opposing thematic notes like this. The poems do not seek to tidily resolve their oppositions into harmony. Rather, Zilelian gathers disparate themes — presence and absence, love and heartbreak, sound and silence — into powerfully unsettled poems. Across personal and historical registers, the thematic friction in the work creates a rich dissonance that captures the discordances of the diaspora, of loss and of living with loss. 

Zilelian’s attention to incongruity enables her to skilfully limn the American immigrant experience. Her portraits of immigrants attend to those ways the cultures of the old world do not dissolve in the new, but remain and resist homogeny, with histories alive and embodied in friction with the new city. In “Arakel, 1979,” a grandfather and survivor of the Armenian Genocide endures the summer heat alongside Cambodian children who have only recently escaped the genocide of the Khmer Rouge:

My dedeh descends the broken cement steps he had once spackled
with cheap plaster, the wrong shade of gray,
and the child refugees gather in a knot,
trailing towards the tin-can drone and my dedeh,
holding out their hands and waiting
for the loose change in his fist, which spills like water
into their tired palms.

Amid a scene of broad cultural differences and distinct immigrant experiences, Zilelian locates a shared history of cataclysmic loss shared by both Cambodians and Armenians, and voices a profound and painful historical harmony. 

Loss is a tonic note in Dissonance. Zilelian attends to the way deeply felt loss sustains the presence of the absent. Where “To the Children, 1915” documents loss on a historic scale, other poems in the collection transpose the theme to the personal, to the loss of loved ones. In “I Will Leave You With This,” the speaker addresses a lover who has already left, and bonds absence to presence:

How did
you leave when you weren’t even here.
The birds serenade darkly, their shrieks buried
under the hunter’s sun. They alight in dangerous circles.
You’re a native to your ailments. Holes in the
sky so large they orchestrate a dissonance
that tethers me to you. I am flailing.

In a stunning transformation, the circling birds of prey become the gestures of a conductor orchestrating a symphony of loss. Paradoxically, the absence is so final, and so deeply felt, that it functions as a tether, binding the separated. Absence and presence come together in an unstable and conflicting amalgam, one she returns to in the aptly titled “War”: 

I lecture to melancholia as if logic
can uproot the violence of love,
as if every morning doesn’t echo
your absence.
I’ll wake in a tangle of nostalgia. I will regret you.
War is also the silence of its ending.

In war, as in heartbreak, violence and conflict persist after any formal truce or separation. In another jarring paradox, the departed leave a silence that resonates in those that remain. 

Dissonance, however, is not without hope. Zilelian’s poems unsettle the finality of grief and loss by situating the fleeting nature of human experience within the regenerative cycles of nature. “Limerence” speaks to the transformative power of deeply felt absence by depicting an experience of loss against the movement of the tides:

Where are you now, while I’m
bloodletting in waves cold and blue.
Some novel shine has lured you. Pale and
unbroken, I appear. Lift your midnight curtain.
From afar, I can see your silvery sheen,
and as I pull towards you
the way the ocean grapples with the moon,
there is no time to regret.
Not even after, when I should.

While a heartbroken lover pulling toward an absent partner “the way the ocean grapples with the moon” is hardly a hopeful image, the poem’s final stanza reorients the loss, positioning it as part of an enduring, natural cycle:

From guts and salt I am summoned,
holding my breath as I unfurl
again and again and again.

Just as the gravitational pull of a far-away moon creates the ocean’s tides, so here does the pull of an absent lover — a distant presence — create a continuation, an unfurling, a regeneration. 

“Figs” also locates hope in regeneration. It opens by recounting a September ritual. The speaker endures wasps and mosquitos to gather figs, “tender fruit,” from a tree in her backyard. The ritual is grounding and joyful: “I arrange my harvest on a / white platter and admire their smooth / shape as if I was the tree itself.” But the following fall, the ritual is no more; the speaker’s life collapses:

This early autumn, I left a broken
summer behind. Life has imploded
and its fragments rattle inside me
like old keys.
Through my kitchen window I watch
bees swarm in the oblivion.
Each fig burst open with decay,
hanging limply. They sour the air,
no longer sweet. How foul they are,
their insides exposed, guts and sickly.
I should feel remorse,
the waste and now the ritual broken.

The transformation is bleak: “life has imploded” and the fig tree’s fruit rots on the branch. Yet, as in “Limerence,” amid crisis and decay, hope begins to turn over:

I wonder if I will ever return,
barefoot and naïve, when I reached
for every ripe bit, when salvaging
had been my best and only hope.

In the past, the practice of salvaging had been a practice of hope. Here, in a situation beyond salvage, the speaker locates hope by turning away from any attempt at rescuing what had been. As the spoiled fruit falls to the ground and grows into a new fig tree, so too will the speaker grow and transform. There’s a paradoxical hope in abandoning the rescue, for in walking away, one can create oneself anew and return in a new form. Indeed, the very poems of Dissonance — resonant, vibrant, alive — can be seen as the fruit of such a regenerative creation.