Reviews of Gravity Assist:
Pandemic Reads
The Rumpus
Presence Journal
DMQ Review
Adroit Poetry Journal
Rain Taxi
Kenyon Review
Broadsided Press
Praise for Reckless Lovely:
Silano creates a space where multiple ways of creating meaning overlap and intersect, illuminating and complicating one another all the while. --Kristina Maria Darling
Silano’s achievement deserves your reading glasses, direct sunlight, and a plate-cleaning literary appetite. Silano’s secular joy is miraculous enough: somehow, she manages to respond to our damaged present with both critique and delighted praise. --Lesley Wheeler
There’s a little bit of Allen Ginsberg here, a little bit of Tom Waits, and a lot of Ella Fitzgerald with her bright, clear voice carrying above all of it, scatting along, asking indeed how high the moon. Andrew Gottlieb, Terrain.org
Reading her poems, I’m reminded a little bit of Pattiann Rogers, a little bit of Barbara Ras, a little bit, even, of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Yet Silano’s voice is her own. The poems are reverent without being pietistic, irreverent without being mean-spirited; they are smart without being pedantic, studded with references to popular culture yet also engaged with large questions; they are fetching and feminist and downright funny.
--Lynn Domina
I never pass up the opportunity to tell people to read Martha Silano's smart, funny, lyrically daring poetry. Silano may be attracted to the poetic possibilities of shenanigans and high jinx, but her mischief always has a keen critical edge. JD Schraffenberger, North American Review
Silano’s speaker is Wallace Stevens’s “rabbi of the diaphanous” or “Gossamer goddess,” but she is also of this world. Her “translucent muse” “lofts // a gauzy lug wrench toward the shadowy / freeway” where a broken-down alphabet “needs a lift.” These “appropriate incongruities” are the force behind the poetry and the poet, herself an “Ever-reveler of the unraveling” and “Undoer of the done. Lisa Perdigao, The Boston Review
There is an audible pulse to Martha Silano's new collection, Reckless Lovely. These lines have an unmistakable rhythm that begs to be voiced, and it is this reaching out beyond the page, this connection between the poet and the reader, that makes this book so pleasurable. Maggie Trapp, The Los Angeles Review
These . . . poems . . . shower words, which tumble over one another as speed is built, who demand to be read aloud and shimmy while doing it. They are saying, Look at me, listen. This is her task, too: attend the poems that seem to at once come out in a gasp of gorgeous imagery and are perfectly rendered, making the experience of reading a kind of cleansing breath. Molly Sutton Kiefer, The Rumpus
She is best when she is rapturous and playful. I value her work for the sheer interest her topics hold. Tina Kelley, Journal of NJ Poets
Praise for The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception:
Martha Silano's impressively inventive third book literally reaches for the stars as its gambit for poetic magnitude, while keeping its feet on the most grounded ground. The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception is a mirror ball reflecting the light of a prolific imagination and filling our dark room with constantly varying, moving, colorful reflections. Herman Asarnow, The Cincinnati Review
Silano’s poems are miraculous in their navigation of dark matter and light, in their finding a way to move forward 'into nothing on a map.' --Foreword Book Reviews
Like Whitman's, Silano's are poems of large embrace and sweep, both linguistically and thematically. David Graham, Verse Wisconsin
The use of sonic riffs and raucous humor enliven this work of the domestic and the divine -- Silano's frenzied diction is just as much rooted in play and pleasure as in exhaustion or pain. This sense of celebration, paired with a sense of wonder at one's surroundings provides a comforting antidote to alienation. American Poet, The Journal of the Academy of American Poets, Fall 2011/Volume 41
Silano boosts you out of your chair and pushes you to turn whether she's being petulant or luminous. Susan Grimm, Barn Owl Review
Silano has a full poetic toolbox, and wields it with a deft hand. She can leap from 'stretch Lycra' to 'stretch limo' in a single line. But it’s her laugh-out-loud sense of humor that will linger. Edgy, risk-taking, and bristlingly alive with language, Silano’s poems have both gravitas and gravy. Barbara Crooker, Valparaiso Poetry Review
All of Silano's poems are accomplished, and her best poems feel important. She gathers the vast and various array of images the world has to offer and presents it to us with the rhythm of litany, the wink of a joke, and the reverence of prayer. JD Schraffenberger, Rain Taxi
The everyday joins together with the holy, the high, however it comes.... In Silano’s hands, these poems present a universe where the fractal reigns, and it’s difficult to tell where the center begins and ends. Éireann Lorsung, Cerise Press
Pandemic Reads
The Rumpus
Presence Journal
DMQ Review
Adroit Poetry Journal
Rain Taxi
Kenyon Review
Broadsided Press
Praise for Reckless Lovely:
Silano creates a space where multiple ways of creating meaning overlap and intersect, illuminating and complicating one another all the while. --Kristina Maria Darling
Silano’s achievement deserves your reading glasses, direct sunlight, and a plate-cleaning literary appetite. Silano’s secular joy is miraculous enough: somehow, she manages to respond to our damaged present with both critique and delighted praise. --Lesley Wheeler
There’s a little bit of Allen Ginsberg here, a little bit of Tom Waits, and a lot of Ella Fitzgerald with her bright, clear voice carrying above all of it, scatting along, asking indeed how high the moon. Andrew Gottlieb, Terrain.org
Reading her poems, I’m reminded a little bit of Pattiann Rogers, a little bit of Barbara Ras, a little bit, even, of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Yet Silano’s voice is her own. The poems are reverent without being pietistic, irreverent without being mean-spirited; they are smart without being pedantic, studded with references to popular culture yet also engaged with large questions; they are fetching and feminist and downright funny.
--Lynn Domina
I never pass up the opportunity to tell people to read Martha Silano's smart, funny, lyrically daring poetry. Silano may be attracted to the poetic possibilities of shenanigans and high jinx, but her mischief always has a keen critical edge. JD Schraffenberger, North American Review
Silano’s speaker is Wallace Stevens’s “rabbi of the diaphanous” or “Gossamer goddess,” but she is also of this world. Her “translucent muse” “lofts // a gauzy lug wrench toward the shadowy / freeway” where a broken-down alphabet “needs a lift.” These “appropriate incongruities” are the force behind the poetry and the poet, herself an “Ever-reveler of the unraveling” and “Undoer of the done. Lisa Perdigao, The Boston Review
There is an audible pulse to Martha Silano's new collection, Reckless Lovely. These lines have an unmistakable rhythm that begs to be voiced, and it is this reaching out beyond the page, this connection between the poet and the reader, that makes this book so pleasurable. Maggie Trapp, The Los Angeles Review
These . . . poems . . . shower words, which tumble over one another as speed is built, who demand to be read aloud and shimmy while doing it. They are saying, Look at me, listen. This is her task, too: attend the poems that seem to at once come out in a gasp of gorgeous imagery and are perfectly rendered, making the experience of reading a kind of cleansing breath. Molly Sutton Kiefer, The Rumpus
She is best when she is rapturous and playful. I value her work for the sheer interest her topics hold. Tina Kelley, Journal of NJ Poets
Praise for The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception:
Martha Silano's impressively inventive third book literally reaches for the stars as its gambit for poetic magnitude, while keeping its feet on the most grounded ground. The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception is a mirror ball reflecting the light of a prolific imagination and filling our dark room with constantly varying, moving, colorful reflections. Herman Asarnow, The Cincinnati Review
Silano’s poems are miraculous in their navigation of dark matter and light, in their finding a way to move forward 'into nothing on a map.' --Foreword Book Reviews
Like Whitman's, Silano's are poems of large embrace and sweep, both linguistically and thematically. David Graham, Verse Wisconsin
The use of sonic riffs and raucous humor enliven this work of the domestic and the divine -- Silano's frenzied diction is just as much rooted in play and pleasure as in exhaustion or pain. This sense of celebration, paired with a sense of wonder at one's surroundings provides a comforting antidote to alienation. American Poet, The Journal of the Academy of American Poets, Fall 2011/Volume 41
Silano boosts you out of your chair and pushes you to turn whether she's being petulant or luminous. Susan Grimm, Barn Owl Review
Silano has a full poetic toolbox, and wields it with a deft hand. She can leap from 'stretch Lycra' to 'stretch limo' in a single line. But it’s her laugh-out-loud sense of humor that will linger. Edgy, risk-taking, and bristlingly alive with language, Silano’s poems have both gravitas and gravy. Barbara Crooker, Valparaiso Poetry Review
All of Silano's poems are accomplished, and her best poems feel important. She gathers the vast and various array of images the world has to offer and presents it to us with the rhythm of litany, the wink of a joke, and the reverence of prayer. JD Schraffenberger, Rain Taxi
The everyday joins together with the holy, the high, however it comes.... In Silano’s hands, these poems present a universe where the fractal reigns, and it’s difficult to tell where the center begins and ends. Éireann Lorsung, Cerise Press