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Editor-at-Large Don Bogen:
I was saddened to hear of the recent death of the poet Martha Silano, who was a friend to many of us at Cincinnati Review and a major contributor to the magazine over the last twenty years. Her work first came to my attention in 2006. It was a pleasure to publish her poems at least four times during my years as poetry editor. I used to make a point of noting something I especially liked in any particular poem we accepted, and I suppose I touched a good number of bases in Martha’s extraordinary work: its imagination and rhetoric (“What I will Tell the Aliens,” Issue 4.1); its specificity and unique vision of domestic life in “Love” (Issue 5.1), which was reprinted in The Best American Poetry 2009; the pacing of “It’s All Gravy” (Issue 7.2). And if I didn’t comment on the humor and boldness of her titles, “The World” (Issue 10.1), which won our Schiff Prize in 2013, caps them all. Among the things that struck me in that amazing poem were its “musical exuberance”—Martha’s poems demand to be read aloud—and “Nerudan sweep.”
I was honored when Martha asked me to write a blurb for what turned out to be her last single book, Terminal Surreal, which will be out in September from our own Acre Books. I’m a little embarrassed when old Pablo popped up in that as well, but my assertion still holds: “I can’t think of a book since Neruda’s odes that’s as rich in particulars or as broad in range.” “Energetic, funny, full of delight, moving, insightful . . .”—I’m running out of terms here, but Martha’s poems never ran out of steam.
Though her work should stay available for a long time to come—in addition to Terminal Surreal, a volume of new and selected poems is coming out from Saturnalia Books this fall—her presence off the page resides in memory now. Running into her in the bookfairs of various AWP conferences over the years was like catching a jolt of open sky amid the general fog of crowds and schmoozing. And when we came to the Richard Hugo House in Seattle for our second Greetings from Cincinnati Review reading in 2012, Martha, along with her fellow Seattle poets Carolyne Wright and Jeannine Hall-Gailey, was a major force in making the event such a success. Contributors’ books sold out and the packed house scooped up subscription forms.
In person and in her poems Martha was a fountain of exuberance. I’d take out a subscription to that any day.
Read a selection of work by Martha Silano:
- miCRo: “During the Cretaceous Our Country Was Divided for Sixty Million Years”
- miCRo: Martha Silano’s “Gifts for the Adventurous Man”
