Customer Reviews

Blue Positive

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BLUE POSITIVE by Martha Silano has a bite, a bark, and some poems make me yelp with pain. It hurts to read "Harborview." Others give me balm, like "Song for a Newborn" and "Explaining Current Events to a One Year Old." All of it feels necessary to read, like reading the details of a dear one's day.

I have Martha Silano's first book of poems (What The Truth Tastes Like) and have been waiting for her second book, and this book does not disappoint!

These poems focus on pregnancy, childbirth, motherhood, postpartum depression and being alive in the world. Silano is a master at language and each poem is a work of art. I have too many favorites to list but I'd have to include "Harborview," "Explaining Current Events to a One-Year Old," "I'll Never Be Dorianne Laux at the Laundromat," and "What They Don't Tell You About the Ninth Month."

Blue Positive is a stunning, rich collection you will not be able to put down and I highly recommend this collection to all. It's a book you can read again and again.

Sensuous and analytical, funny and heartbreaking. Silano shares her experiences of motherhood with this shimmering new collection of poems. What comes through most is the author's sense of joyous reverence, and for everything from African daisies to zygotes. Wonderful.

The poems in Blue Positive, Silano's second collection, are not shy. Like a best friend, they'll invite you in and tell you everything. In language that's sexy and funny, smart (oh, the delicious lists!) and tender, Silano gives voice to the full emotional range of family life and new motherhood, including an almost-devastating postpartum experience. "Lots of things// could easily ignite," she writes in the poem "Explaining Current Events to a One-Year Old", and, in "Crown of Sonnets for a Son," "In truth, I worry more than laugh." But fear is not the overriding impulse in these poems; instead, what's wins out is appreciation for nature's mysteries and wonders, and above all else, joy: "I'm uplifted,// I'll admit, by the notion of peering,/ ever hopeful, toward a darkening sky" ("What Do You Do When You're Blue?") This book is daring and lovely.

Touching, warm, clever, wry, and gifted in lyricism and breadth of vision. A gem.