Terminal Surreal - by Martha Silano (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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. . . .

Review Quotes

"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"

"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""

"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""

"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""

About the Author

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.