DISSONANCE
Winner of Swan Scythe’s 2025 Chapbook Prize
Released 2025
“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.”
From “Grief and Hope in the poetry of Dissonance” by Sean Casey, The Markaz Review, June 2026
“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
Cover by: Kevork Mourad
Published by: Swan Scythe
“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…..I call it brilliant. I call it hopeful. I call it the miracle of art.”
– Gail Wronsky, author of Some Disenfranchised Evening
“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……These poems sing close to the heart and to history.”
– Olena Jennings, Age of Secrets