Martha Silano

Artist Statement

My poems often center on the natural world and rely heavily on lived experience, often focusing on our Earth’s flora, fauna, bioregions, and geologic features. I also write about astrophysics and the cosmos. Increasingly, my work has centered around environmental peril, climate grief/optimism/hope, and the Anthropocene, and calling attention to changing weather patterns, forest fires, warming seas, endangered species, and the need to act quickly to reduce carbon outputs. I am urgently drawn to catalogue the species that are managing to survive, along with those that are not, and exposing the ways human beings are leading us toward catastrophe. Influential writers include Craig Santos Perez, Claire Wahmanholm, Barbara Ungar, Elizabeth Bradfield, and Geffrey Davis. I am motivated by an unceasing passion for poetry; it’s my excuse to learn all I can during this brief period I am alive.

Martha Silano_front cover_Gravity Assist_2019

Bio

Martha Silano is the author of five collections of poetry, including Gravity Assist, Reckless Lovely, and The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception, all from Saturnalia Books. She is also co-author, with Kelli Russell Agodon, of The Daily Poet: Day-by-Day Prompts for Your Writing Practice. Martha’s poems have appeared in Poetry, Paris Review, Kenyon Review, and American Poetry Review, and in many print anthologies, including the Best American Poetry series, and Dear Human at the Edge of Time: Poem on Climate Change in the United States (Paloma Press 2023). Awards include North American Review’s James Hearst Poetry Prize and The Cincinnati Review’s Robert and Adele Schiff Poetry Prize. She’s received residency fellowships from Yaddo, the Millay Colony for the Arts, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the University of Arizona Poetry Center, among others. Martha teaches at Bellevue College. Her website is available at marthasilano.net.

marthasilano.net