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. . . .
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. . . .
Reviews
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
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