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Barbara Hurd’s work appears in Best American Essays 1999 (Houghton Mifflin). Her first book, Stirring the Mud: On Swamps, Bogs, and Human Imagination, is due out this month from Beacon Press. She teaches and lives in Frostburg, Maryland.
A few propositions: Dissonance inspires patience; discord, correction. Discord is neither arranged nor disarranged; it’s haphazard, without any sense of audience or any context larger than itself — an earmuffed dolphin in a closet with a drumstick attached to its flipper. Dissonance, however, is a seal wobbled by currents on its way to a fish-rich cove. It has a direction in mind. Dissonance expects to be heard. It’s composed.
May 2011When, by some act of grace, the lines we think are there dissolve, something else appears, something timeless and rich, an intermediate zone, languid and latent, the lushness of something about to be and in no particular hurry to make it happen. The boundary between physical and spiritual melts, and we see that one is always infused with the other.
March 2001Has something we published moved you? Fired you up? Did we miss the mark? We’d love to hear about it.
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