Martha Silano's new book What The Truth Tastes Like, (Two Sylvias Press, 2015) is a second edition of her original, award-winning collection published in 1999. This revised book includes twenty new poems, a Foreword by David Kirby, and an Afterword by Martha Silano. Praise for What The Truth Tastes Like: From clear-eyed attention to the ordinary world, Martha Silano makes poems that instruct, startle, and give pleasure as only a great poem can. –David Kirby  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 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 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

What The Truth Tastes Like

Literature & Fiction

Silano, Martha

Poetry

Two Sylvias Press

A collection of intricately-crafted poems that honestly and movingly address pregnancy, childbirth, postpartum depression, and other aspects of family life.

Blue Positive

Steel Toe Books

With humor and musicality, Martha Silano’s The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception rollicks through fourteen billion years of cosmology: galaxies, aliens, an astronaut’s dropped glove. When she’s not picking a bone with a shortsighted and side-talking populous, she’s conceiving her own personal Big Bang. When her nouns are diaper and bibs, Silano sticks to a larger vision, seeing past gelatinous mashed peas toward the moon and stars. This cosmic-consciousness is woven right in with the mittens and the meercats, her lens taking in not only the crumbs she must wipe up, but also polio-stricken nations, the hungry Eritreans, “the old man who shuffles along / as if he might be carrying / in that steamy bowl / all our children’s futures.” We’re all “sibling citizens of this swirly world,” writes Silano, but she knows that danger lurks not only in the heavens and the atmosphere, but also on our glistening streets. As Campbell McGrath notes, The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception is “comic and wise, quotidian and celestial.”

The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception

Saturnalia Books

Martha Silano's new collection begins with The Big Bang and ends with the unleashing of twelve million bees from a jack-knifed semi. In between Reckless Lovely ricochets from Renaissance masterworks to amusement parks, from fissures to fission, praising everything from peregrines to parameciums. Reveling in galaxies and marveling at Earth's miracles, Reckless Lovely opens the door to the radiantly inscrutable and the splendidly baffling.

Reckless Lovely

As in in O, OPRAH MAGAZINE... Write a poem a day every day of the year! The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts For Your Writing Practice (Published by Two Sylvias Press) offers a unique writing prompt for every day of the year. Created by poets for poets, this calendar of exercises offers inspiration and a place to begin. Whether you are a novice or well-established author, The Daily Poet is an essential resource for poets, teachers, professors, or anyone who wants to jumpstart their writing practice. The Daily Poet is portable, coffeeshop tested, and offers quick warm-ups for any writing group or classroom. An excellent guide for students, The Daily Poet is also a handy reference for poets looking for fresh ideas to share in their writing workshops.

The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts For Your Writing Practice

Agodon, Kelli Russell

History & Criticism

CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

This collection of narrative poetry was the winner of the 1998 William and Kingman Page Poetry Book Award, sponsored by the Potato Eyes Foundation. Ms. Silano writes snappy and stimulating poems to which modern Americans can readily relate.

What the Truth Tastes Like

Nightshade Press

Gravity Assist, the newest collection by Martha Silano, masterfully measures the heights and depths of our earthly visions. Cerebral yet meditative, capacious yet focused, this book soars with investigations and ruminations, love letters, origin stories, and notes on gravitational forces both literal and metaphorical. Through her usual nimble style, Silano deftly weaves the humanistic and the cosmic, delivering a series of up-close and personal examinations of phenomena as far flung as copepods, nebula, trilobites, preening cormorants, or “Reaching out to soothe you, /the twisted arms of the last of three species of endemic /sea stars ripping themselves apart, arms crawling away in opposite directions, insides spilling out.”

Gravity Assist

Saturnalia

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Books by Silano, Martha