About CHORUS:

Poems that incorporate multiple voices to embrace fragmentation, discord, and plurality.

At a time of simultaneous isolation and interconnection, this book is an inquiry into the edges of the self. Pushing back on capitalist messages of individuality, CHORUS instead seeks the multifaceted self that engages with the radical diversity that characterizes any healthy ecosystem or society. Moving between a remote canyon in New Mexico, the Pacific Northwest, New York City, the virtual world, the past, and the unstable future, the author asks, “Whose afterimage am I?”
The sprawling, celebratory, mourning chorus of this book is the sum of many voices; the words of other writers, poets, and artists are interwoven with the author’s words. This is a celebration of language’s capacity to supersede bodily limits, mortality, and existential loneliness. Daniela Naomi Molnar’s chorus encompasses violence, love, empathy, fear, a burning planet, a pandemic, heartbreak, desire, joy, and grief. Rather than seeking resolution, these poems look through the lens of a fragmented self, dwelling in plurality, discord, and harmony.

"[A] striking debut. . . . These poems do not deliver tidy answers to the dilemmas of existence, but rather investigate the division and fragmentation with lyric urgency." ― Publishers Weekly

Author bio:

Daniela Naomi Molnar is a poet, artist and writer who creates with color, water, language, and place. Her paintings are created with pigments she has made from plants, bones, stones, rainwater and glacial melt. Poems and essays are created alongside the pigments and paintings; the practices overlap and influence each other to create new ecologies—paintings, poems, books, exhibits, classes, and installations. Her work is the subject of a front-page feature in Los Angeles Times, a PBS Oregon Art Beat profile, an entry in the Oregon Encyclopedia, and a feature in Poetry Daily. Her debut book CHORUS won the 2024 Oregon Book Award for Poetry and was selected by Kazim Ali as the winner of theOmnidawn Press’ 1st/2nd Book Award. Upcoming books include: PROTOCOLS (Ayin Press, 2025) and Light / Remains (Bored Wolves Press, 2026). She founded the Art + Ecology program at the Pacific Northwest College of Art and helped start and run the backcountry artist residency Signal Fire. More info at danielamolnar.com.