Diana Athena is a New York City-based poet. Originally from Omsk, Russia, Diana is fluent in both Russian and English which, along with her practice of literary translation, has given her a deep appreciation of language and its potential. Diana’s work captures instants: her poems stop and illuminate time inviting the reader to confront their own interiority against the outer limits of the body.
PRAISE:
Echoes In Still Air takes steps into the silence one desires — as a temporal solitude beyond the rhizome into the sensory. In poems crafted with the precision of an effortless rhythm allowed its echo, time feeds time its delicate reclaiming, gathered over an exposed heart. We are read into our stillness submerged by a tenuous call to the mirror below the soul. Each territory — a shifting horizon through the relentless porosity of an empty page, where the reader finds the poet at their most bare. The book is a harmonic elegy around three poems — concentric ripples to invoke a body’s contours around one force field. Words become an elemental palimpsest, opening the page-scape for travel through metaphysical entrails in skittered alongings that redrift relistening. The poet creates their world in witness to the reader’s — a tome for a life slipped through melody’s insistent alignments. Diana Athena‘s sublime first collection levels serenity with an open cut, a felt sense of an immersion about to materialize, giving zero gravity its ravenous lifeforms.
–Edwin Torres
Echoes in Still Air is a pleasure for eye, ear, and heart. Diana’s poems invite the reader into a meditative state like a skilled and subtle guide, striking the just right balance between structure and freedom, precision and permission, always with “gold at the end / of a serpentine road.” I find myself wanting to turn the pages to savor the shapes of the poems themselves, then go back and inhabit their music.
–Matthew Burgess
In an interview, Marianne Moore once said that the words of her poems “cluster like chromosomes, determining the procedure.” I thought of this phrase while reading Diana Athena’s stunning debut chapbook, Echoes in Still Air, mesmerized by the kaleidoscopic way that language gathers and breaks apart in these pages. These poems annotate and embroider the fault lines in our daily living. They draw together, in their exquisite and fragmented language, body, landscape, and ecology into a kind of prayer. Reading them, I feel attuned to senses I didn’t even know I possessed.
–Emily Skillings
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