Gravity Assist

by Martha Silano

Overview

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.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781947817005
Publisher:	Saturnalia Books
Publication date:	03/15/2019
Edition description:	None
Pages:	88
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 7.50(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Martha Silano is the author of What the Truth Tastes Like, Blue Positive, The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception (winner of the 2010 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize, an Academy of American Poets Noted Book of 2011, and a Washington State Book Award finalist), and Reckless Lovely. Her poems have appeared widely, in such places as The Paris Review, North American Review, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review Online, American Poetry Review, and in The Best American Poetry 2009. Martha teaches at Bellevue College.

Table of Contents

Song of Weights and Measurements 1

I Periapsis

Here I am 5

Despite Nagging Malfunctions 6

It will have started as a small comb 8

Doomed Moon 9

My Mother Who Told Me 10

1961 11

Instead of a father 13

Bloodline 14

Report Your Unusual Phenomenon 15

Tributary 17

Dear Absolute Certainty 18

X 20

Questions for Your Shadow 21

No, it did not give you wings 23

Notes on Gravitational Forces 24

The Chamber of Silence 26

II Orbit Insertion

My Environs 31

When I saw the loblolly pine 32

The World 33

Gerbils in Space 35

Dear Mr. Wordsworth 37

Coots on a Lake 39

On a Job Posting for a Copepod Collector 40

Gift Tower 42

Ode to Autocorrect 43

Jealous 45

Adjacent to the way 48

The Trilobites 49

Screaming Skulls, and the Like 51

Beneath twelve feet of ashy topsoil 53

The New Nature Poem 55

Scorching Sinkhole Renga 58

Nearly Every Songbird on Earth Is Eating Plastic 59

Still Life with Motorcycle Revving, Walling Siren, American Goldfinch Trill 61

Hummingbirds of the World 63

Time for art in the cosmos is very short 64

This highway's a ribbon 66

III Escape Velocity

Bumblebees are made of ash 71

Space Probe Pantoum 72

Because the Dead Never Vanish 74

Ode to a Bell Pepper 76

Life on Mars 77

The Mechanical Hope Contraption 78

Oh, Jerry 80

Tornado 81

Lately my gratitude's 82

Yes, of course 83

Peach Glosa 84

I am the miraculous 86

Break-Away Effect 87