Praise for Blue Positive: Martha Silano's poems are full of sex and birth and food, mind and body. Their richness of detail makes reading this book like entering a home: there is a bustle to her language as she tries to gather everything she loves. Silano writes, "I'm surprised how the trees keep themselves/from falling, how mostly stable this sloping, unpredictable earth." By the end of Blue Positive, I trust both her surprise and her wisdom. —Bob Hicok These are exuberant, humorous poems, bursting with love of language, the body, and deep play. Pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering are central to Blue Positive, and here Silano's eye is especially fresh and original: "The cosmos dances, // but an embryo? I see her more / as taking up shop, blow torch in one hand, // jack hammer in the other." (from "Begging to Differ.") "Harborview" is a harrowing poem about post-partum depression, where we learn "some god's gotten hold of me." But Silano shows us how a bright and ultimately optimistic sensibility can overcome disaster. As she tells us in a delightful crown of sonnets written for her son, "I try to laugh at what I can't control." In these fine poems Martha Silano takes us "over Niagra without the barrel," to a place where "Salvaging Just Might Lead to Salvation." —Peter Pereira Order Blue Positive  |  Read excerpts Read Cranky's review  |  Read LitRag's review Praise for What the Truth Tastes Like: Martha Silano reveals that she "invented the perpetually grieving Linzer torte and the self-effervescing catbox lid" and I believe her. Her poems are full of good stuff--sausages and Oklahoma villages and dreams of parrots. Even when love has gone sour and the lover has gone south, the energy and inventiveness never flag. We know she'll be right back, offering more truthful tastes. Take a big bite, this is a strong first serving. —Robert Hershon, Ed. Hanging Loose The truth tastes like these succulent poems. Their refrains will form on your lips and ring in your heart. In these rich, elegant--and wickedly witty--pieces, Martha Silano has captured the rhythms that percolate, unheard by the rest of us, just beneath the surface of everyday life. —Laura Kalpakian Martha Silano writes with wit and intelligence, and she is equally at home naming the birds on a beach and the arcana of the yellow pages. It is her love of language that distinguishes these poems and makes them so full of startling awareness, and this not only at the level of the word, but also in the syntax, which reveals the mind's continual approach and avoidance of its emotional home. —Alison Hawthorne Deming Order What the Truth Tastes Like   |   Read excerpts
		©1999-2006 Martha Silano