Author: Diana Senechal
Paperback, 94 pages, 2025
ISBN-13: 978-1947175631

About the Author

Diana Senechal’s newest book Solo Concert is her first full-length poetry collection. Senechal is the 2011 winner of the Hiett Prize in the Humanities and the author of two books of nonfiction, Republic of Noise (2012) and Mind over Memes (2018), as well as numerous poems, stories, essays, songs, and translations. Her translations of the poetry of Tomas Venclova have been featured in two books (Winter Dialogue, 1997 and The Junction, 2008); her translation of Gyula Jenei’s poetry collection Mindig más (Always Different: Poems of Memory) was published in 2022 by Deep Vellum. She is currently working on a book about the songwriting partnership of Tamás Cseh and Géza Bereményi. Since 2017 she has been teaching at the Varga Katalin Gimnázium in Szolnok; in 2024 she served as the president of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers. For more about her work, see her website (dianasenechal.com).

“Diana Senechal is a great and original poet, with one eye on tradition and one astringent, compassionate eye on what really is–here in the shadowy now. Her presence, it’s almost an ache, is deeply compelling and moving.”

— Rick Moody, author of Hotels of North America

“A poem by Diana Senechal is smart, witty, and resourceful. Also it boasts a stone-like integrity. And Solo Concert, subtly coherent and evidently unified by theme, is itself like a “multitude” of stones on a gravestone, placed there by pilgrims, in concert evoking “songs” in the “kindred air,” hosannas perhaps of ‘holy gadflies.'”

— David Havird, author of Weathering: Poems and Recollections

“Solo Concert is centered on music, but more the delicate interstices—“the unheard hosanna,” “bells in a slant of sun”—than blaring crescendos. These poems are listeners rather than talkers. Senechal’s poetic voice, often humble and disarming (“I’m still learning to talk”), is ultimately inexorable (“I must occur”). In “Jackrabbit,” she imagines a roadkill rabbit the instant before death in the headlights asking itself “what if, what if.” Solo Concert has this kind of immediacy: the poet as large-eared conduit staying open to “the roar of things I do not understand.” It’s a tremendous debut collection.”

— John Wall Barger, author of The Elephant of Silence

“The voice lurking behind everyday things is like meaning. If we try to grasp it by force, it always slips through our fingers. However, if we give up control and allow it to slip away, we too can become listeners to a world where meaning begins to take shape without us. Yet it always and continuously pertains to us. Diana Senechal’s poems are beautiful imprints of this music.”

— Csenger Kertai, author of B. rövid élete (“The Short Life of B.”)