Terminal Surreal

Poems

Häftad, Engelska, 2025

289 kr

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This unflinching poetry collection follows the author’s diagnosis with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). In her masterful poetry collection Terminal Surreal, Martha Silano confronts the reality of mortality with gorgeous attention to imagery and scene. The book follows a trajectory from early symptoms before diagnosis with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) to full-blown illness and its effects on friends and family, including her children, who appear in poems like “After Dropping My Son Off at College” and “My Nineteen-Year-Old Daughter Is My Personal Assistant.”With a devoted naturalist’s eye, Silano revels in birds, trees, and flowers in a way that reminds readers we are connected to the world around us. The book touches on the medical, the metaphysical, and even the cosmological (through encounters in medical offices and on a moon of Mars). With Nutter Butters and Lorna Doones, abecedarians and self-elegies, Silano’s singular, feisty, contemporary voice propels these poems of grief and acceptance as they explore the transformational power of art.When I Learn Catastrophicallyis an anagram of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.When I learn I probably have a couple years,maybe (catastrophically) less, crossword puzzlesbegin to feel meaningless, though not the pairof mergansers, not the red cardinal of my heart.The sky does all sorts of marvelously uncatastrophicthings that winter I shimmy between science& song, between widgeons & windows, weather& its invitation to walk. Walking, which becomesmy lose less, my less morsels, my lose smilewhile more sore looms. . . .

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2025-09-01
Mått152 x 229 x 10 mm
Vikt200 g
FormatHäftad
SpråkEngelska
Antal sidor116
FörlagAcre Books
ISBN9781946724946

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Martha Silano (1962–2025) was the author of This One We Call Ours, Gravity Assist, Reckless Lovely, The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception, and the forthcoming collection Last Train to Paradise: New and Selected Poems. She was coauthor of The Daily Poet: Day-by-Day Prompts for Your Writing Practice. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, The Missouri Review, and many anthologies. Diagnosed with ALS in 2023, she lived in Seattle, Washington, until May 2025.

I.Can’t Complain,Flying RatsSelf-Appraisal at 62I’m Not So Good at Corpse PoseMistakes Were MadeWhat’s TerriblePossible DiagnosisIt’s Benzene, It’s Ash, It’s Lead,Unambiguously,Elegy with Exhaust Fan and Robin Song at DuskI Have Thoughts Fed by the Sun,MortalOn a Bench Facing WestDeath PoemII.Orders of OperationSince You’re AliveWhen I Learn CatastrophicallyTo-Do ListAbecedarian with ALSI am the last loss,When I’m on the BedAt the Mycological Society Survivors BanquetI didn’t understand Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale”Is This My Last Ferry Trip?Terminal SurrealAbecedarian on a Friday MorningSelf-ElegiesIII.When I Can’t Get Out of BedWhat You See Isn’t What You GetIt’s Difficult to UnderstandTodayWake-Up CallWhy I Want to Be a Noble GasSometimes It’s Nice to Be Taken AwaySpas of the MindThe Busy Roadways of the DeadCars & SuchLeoWhen My Phone Tells MeWhy I’d Make a Great ChemistIV.John Muir ElementaryNext Week We Have a Doudle AssinmentThere Are Thousands of Pleasures,Double Triptych for the Months of Nectarine and PlumKey GroveHow It Is TodayWhat I Didn’t RealizeHow to FallAfter Dropping My Son Off at College,Poem on My Son’s Twenty-Third BirthdayMy Nineteen-Year-Old Daughter Is My Personal Assistant,A Poem about TwinflowerSpoon TheorySmileIf We Didn’t Leave the Task to BackhoesLegacyV.I Found Small Slices of JoyI Always Wake Up HappyTaking a Walk with RimbaudPostcard from Some Unknown Part of My BrainWhat I’ll MissI Want to Be an Adirondack ChairShe’s Pretty Much Who She Was,You-n-MePoetry,Portrait of Apple Cinnamon Mush, Chobani Yogurt Drink, and BiPAPBefore and After: A Quasi-AbecedarianMaking the Best of ItYou Are Much More Than This Body

“There has never been a life force quite like the life force that is Martha Silano, ‘a feisty feckful gal / who fancied words like gherkin / and scintillate,’ and no poetry like the poetry that springs from that life force. Live-wire lines flood with lifeblood. Images emerge from a voracious mind, with a breathless studiousness, and a witnessed understanding of ecology, the cosmos, and the body. Hers is the poetics of being unabashedly in love with life. In Terminal Surreal, Silano, having received a terminal diagnosis, steps into an astonishingly forthright, exuberant investigation of mortality, its beauty, and its price. I have no doubt this voice, these poems, will live forever.”