Terminal Surreal: Poems

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. . . .

Martha Silano is 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 is 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. Silano lives in Seattle, Washington.