Overview

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 Catastrophically is an anagram of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. When I learn I probably have a couple years, maybe (catastrophically) less, crossword puzzles begin to feel meaningless, though not the pair of mergansers, not the red cardinal of my heart. The sky does all sorts of marvelously uncatastrophic things that winter I shimmy between science & song, between widgeons & windows, weather & its invitation to walk. Walking, which becomes my lose less, my less morsels, my lose smile while more sore looms. . . .

Full Product Details

Author:   Martha Silano
Publisher:   Acre Books
Imprint:   Acre Books
Dimensions:   Width: 15.20cm , Height: 1.00cm , Length: 22.90cm
Weight:   0.172kg
ISBN:  

9781946724946

ISBN 10:   1946724947
Pages:   116
Publication Date:   01 September 2025
Audience:   General/trade ,  General
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Out of stock  
The supplier is temporarily out of stock of this item. It will be ordered for you on backorder and shipped when it becomes available.

Table of Contents

I. Can’t Complain, Flying Rats Self-Appraisal at 62 I’m Not So Good at Corpse Pose Mistakes Were Made What’s Terrible Possible Diagnosis It’s Benzene, It’s Ash, It’s Lead, Unambiguously, Elegy with Exhaust Fan and Robin Song at Dusk I Have Thoughts Fed by the Sun, Mortal On a Bench Facing West Death Poem II. Orders of Operation Since You’re Alive When I Learn Catastrophically To-Do List Abecedarian with ALS I am the last loss, When I’m on the Bed At the Mycological Society Survivors Banquet I didn’t understand Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” Is This My Last Ferry Trip? Terminal Surreal Abecedarian on a Friday Morning Self-Elegies III. When I Can’t Get Out of Bed What You See Isn’t What You Get It’s Difficult to Understand Today Wake-Up Call Why I Want to Be a Noble Gas Sometimes It’s Nice to Be Taken Away Spas of the Mind The Busy Roadways of the Dead Cars & Such Leo When My Phone Tells Me Why I’d Make a Great Chemist IV. John Muir Elementary Next Week We Have a Doudle Assinment There Are Thousands of Pleasures, Double Triptych for the Months of Nectarine and Plum Key Grove How It Is Today What I Didn’t Realize How to Fall After Dropping My Son Off at College, Poem on My Son’s Twenty-Third Birthday My Nineteen-Year-Old Daughter Is My Personal Assistant, A Poem about Twinflower Spoon Theory Smile If We Didn’t Leave the Task to Backhoes Legacy V. I Found Small Slices of Joy I Always Wake Up Happy Taking a Walk with Rimbaud Postcard from Some Unknown Part of My Brain What I’ll Miss I Want to Be an Adirondack Chair She’s Pretty Much Who She Was, You-n-Me Poetry, Portrait of Apple Cinnamon Mush, Chobani Yogurt Drink, and BiPAP Before and After: A Quasi-Abecedarian Making the Best of It You Are Much More Than This Body

Reviews

“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.”  * Diane Seuss, author of ""Modern Poetry"" and ""frank: sonnets"" * “The sheer abundance of the world in Terminal Surreal is striking. I can’t think of a book since Neruda’s odes that’s as rich in particulars or as broad in range. From Keats to a clam that can live a hundred sixty years, from clean cupboards to constellations, poem after poem explodes with imagination and discovery. Martha Silano’s distinctive voice—energetic, funny, inquisitive, full of delight—animates her deft explorations of the past, the present, and what’s to come. Terminal Surreal is exuberant, moving, and insightful.”  * Don Bogen, author of ""Immediate Song"" * “What brilliance and what exuberance characterize Terminal Surreal, Martha Silano’s seventh book of poems. Alea iacta est: within the first few pages, the poet reveals her diagnosis of ALS. For the rest of the book she struggles with that bitter sentence, it is true, but even more, she hurls herself headlong into her love affair with the world. ‘Wasn’t there always awe, punctuated / with grief?’ she asks for instance in ‘It’s Benzene, It’s Ash, It’s Lead.’ Weren’t we always elegies with spleens? But today all I care about is the Island Marble Butterfly making a comeback. Coming back in all its green- and-white-mottled glory. This is a learned book (how much she knows about science!) and a funny book. But most of all, it is a brave book. ‘Always Wake Up Happy,’ one poem is titled: ‘because, you know, I could’ve died while I lay me down.’ So could we all. But dying, Martha Silano superbly shows us living.” * Ann Fisher-Wirth, author of ""Paradise Is Jagged"" and coeditor of ""Attached to the Living World: A New Ecopoetry Anthology"" * ""Her forthcoming book of poems “Terminal Surreal” explores the difficulties of being alive and knowing there’s no cure for her ailment."" * University of Washington Magazine *

Author Information

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.

Tab Content 6

Author Website:  

Countries Available

All regions