Poetry student Diana Athena explores healing after loss in her debut poetry collection Echoes in Still Air. The chapbook will be published by Finishing Line Press in November 2025, and can be preordered here.
Echoes in Still Air breathes through grief. Through seeking unity with nature, Athena rebuilds trust that life continues. When a dear friend of Athena’s tragically lost her husband in early 2024, “her grief resonated with my own lingering grief, which fueled this collection,” Athena said.
“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,” said Adjunct Assistant Professor Edwin Torres.
Athena, who is also a yoga teacher, brings the mindfulness and ritual of her meditation practice to her practice and poems. Each of the three sections that structure the book starts with a meditation, like an invitation. Athena describes her process as collaborative with the poems themselves, listening to what each poem asks to become.
“[Athena’s poems] 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,” said Adjunct Assistant Professor Emily Skillings ’17.
Adjunct Assistant Professor Matthew Burgess said, “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.”
Diana Athena was born in Omsk, Russia, and immigrated to the US at the age of 19. She has been writing in English since 2016. Her poems have received Beatrice Dubin Rose and Bernard Grebanier Awards and appeared in The Junction, The Lit, Stuck in the Library, and Ghost Girls Zine. She will graduate from the School of the Arts later this year.
