Author: Diana Senechal
Diana Senechal is the author of Mind over Memes: Passive Listening, Toxic Talk, and Other Modern Language Follies (2018) and Republic of Noise: The Loss of Solitude in Schools and Culture (2012). Her translations of the poetry of Tomas Venclova are featured in his books Winter Dialogue (1997) and The Junction (2008). A member of the ALSCW Council and a Fellow of the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, she teaches at the Varga Katalin Gimnázium in Szolnok, Hungary. In addition to teaching, writing, and translating, she serves in a cantorial role at the synagogue Szim Salom in Budapest, plays the cello, memorizes poems in various languages, and takes long bike rides through the Hungarian plains and hills.
Gyula Jenei: Cemetery
Gyula Jenei: Piano
“A Wild Clarity”: John Wall Barger’s The Mean Game
The Mean Game
by John Wall Barger
(Palimpsest Press, 96 pages, $18.95 CDN / $17.95 USD)
Suppose not only the laws of physics, but the laws of morality played out before our eyes, moment to moment, in the entirety of things, from depth to surface. Suppose this were a world where all animate beings had feelings, thoughts, and purposes, and where even intentions had consequences—where our cruelties would come back not as phantoms, but as matter. Suppose, moreover, that instead of falling asleep to this reality, or lulling our way out of it, we were to lurch into it again and again, into a full view of our own excesses, crimes, and deformed dreams. Such is the world of John Wall Barger’s book of poetry The Mean Game. Poem after poem wakes us up to ourselves and shakes us into new cadences. I read agog.