What the Truth Tastes Like [Paperback]

Martha Silano (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 1999

This collection of narrative poetry was the winner of the 1998 William and Kingman Page Poetry Book Award, sponsored by the Potato Eyes Foundation. Ms. Silano writes snappy and stimulating poems to which modern Americans can readily relate.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Martha Silano reveals that she "invented the perpetually grieving Linzer torte and the self-effervescing catbox lid" and I believe her. Her poems are full of good stuff--sausages and Oklahoma villages and dreams of parrots. Even when love has gone sour and the lover has gone south, the energy and inventiveness never flag. We know she'll be right back, offering more truthful tastes. Take a big bite, this is a strong first serving. -- Robert Hershon Ed. Hanging Loose

Martha Silano writes with wit and intelligence, and she is equally at home naming the birds on a beach and the arcana of the yellow pages. It is her love of language that distinguishes these poems and makes them so full of startling awareness, and this not only at the level of the word, but also in the syntax, which reveals the mind's continual approach and avoidance of its emotional home. -- Alison Hawthorne Deming

The truth tastes like these succulent poems. Their refrains will form on your lips and ring in your heart. In these rich, elegant--and wickedly witty--pieces, Martha Silano has captured the rhythms that percolate, unheard by the rest of us, just beneath the surface of everyday life. -- Laura Kalpakian

About the Author

Martha Silano was born in Metuchen, NJ. She received her BA from Grinnell College and her MA from the University of Washington. She currently lives in the Pacific Northwest, where she teaches English at Bellevue and Edmonds Community Colleges. Since 1994 Martha has been a resident of the Millay Colony for the Arts, Dorland Mountain Arts Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the University of Arizona Poetry Center. Her work has appeared or is fothcoming in numerous literary journals, including The Paris Review, The Florida Review, Poetry Northwest, Potato Eyes, Hanging Loose, Crab Creek Review, and Verse. This is Marthas first book of poetry.

Product Details

• Paperback: 52 pages
• Publisher: Nightshade Press (October 1, 1999)
• ISBN-10: 1879205815
• ISBN-13: 978-1879205819
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.2 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,924,038 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Martha Silano is the author of three books of poetry: The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception, Blue Positive, and What the Truth Tastes Like. Her poems have appeared in Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, TriQuarterly, AGNI, and in over a dozen anthologies. She teaches at Bellevue College.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A delight!, January 25, 2000

By 

Lisa Najavits (Brookline, MA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: What the Truth Tastes Like (Paperback)

Martha Silano's "What the Truth Tastes Like" is an extraordinary book of poems! Her wit, evocative use of language, depth of feeling, and sharp intelligence shine through. The poems bring to life a sensibility that appears steeped in everyday life yet also connects with broader, universal themes. I am amazed by her range and her ability to convey in few words, a moment, a look, a memory. This book is truly a delight.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Treat, January 7, 2000

By 

S. Luftig (New York, NY) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: What the Truth Tastes Like (Paperback)

If WHAT THE TRUTH TASTES LIKE included nothing but the poem, "What I Meant to Say Before I Said 'So Long,'" if would be reason enough to buy this sumptuous first book by Martha Silano. In "What I Meant to Say. . . " Silano creates a world as delicate, dangerous, and gleaming as a spider's web, and it brings me to tears. Luckily for us, however, this poem is not alone. Silano lays out a full feast of wonderful verses in a collection that is deliciously unpeggable. She cinematically unfolds an unexpected tragedy, as witnessed by a group of birdwatchers, in "At the Shorebird Festival: Grays Harbor, Washington." She takes on the persona of an angry horse in the stark, edgy "They're Prohibited by City Ordinance." And in "Men of the Stone Age Had No Use for Fractions," she celebrates abundance--with a wink. And such a wink, for Silano, is not unusual. These poems are laced with humor; sometimes subtle, sometimes sly, sometimes silly. In "The Sausage Parade" she serves up past boyfriends with plenty of spice. In "Just Don't Write Any Poems About Niagara Falls," she brings the art of curse-laying to new and hilarious heights. And she responds the way some of us only dream of in "To the Woman Who, When I Went to Heat My Pizza in the Office Microwave, Asked Me, 'Who Are You?'" Not every poem, however, properly shows off Silano's humor and compassion, her enormous appreciation of nature (especially birds) or her knack for telling a tale. "Shrimp Arithmetic" despite its intriguing title, is inaccessible to me after repeated readings. "Notes from the Committee Investigating the Abolishment of Um" doesn't quite live up to the fun of its premise. And while she generally uses her lists of names, objects, and titles to wonderful effect in poems such as "In Praise of Body Hair," "The Man Who Slept in My Bed," the whimsical "In That Other Universe" and the outrageously imaginative "For a Friend Who Sends Me a Flyer on the Art of Ear Candling and News Her Book has Arrived," she pushes her listmaking to excess, without enough heart, in "A Trip to the Yellow Pages: Ba, Be, and So Forth." But who's perfect? WHAT THE TRUTH TASTES LIKE is a rich and triumphant first offering, with many a poem to savor.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I loved this!, December 19, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: What the Truth Tastes Like (Paperback)

I loved this book! The poems in What the Truth Tastes Like, Martha Silano's first collection, are smart, funny, and personal, above all displaying a deep love of language in a search for meaning and connection.

The poems here are about birth, death, and the relationships ended or sustained in between, about childhood and identity. They describe the doings of people in the wild and the backyard: the tide after a man drowns "erases every footprint, and where he lay a flock of whimbrels alights"; the cosmos explained by dad, "post-cookout star-gazer"; the showers of sparks loved by those who "live in the shadow of live volcanoes, the chance we'll awake to at least a dusting of ash."

Inner worlds are explored here engagingly as well. Contemplating ear candling, for example, the speaker follows the flame through the "bony labyrinth" wondering about the contents it will loosen and extrude: "your mother the harbinger's honey the belt goes around your waist ... blue side down? ... Could you have it skip the refusals, the let's just be friends?" Recounting the history of sausages, the poet illuminates not only her own heritage but that of a string of exes through descriptions of their sausages of choice.

"Bring me everything and don't peel it," insists the speaker in the final section of the book. When we "want to know if it's worth springing for a valentine tub or a boat ride to Cave of the Winds and the trilobite wall," Silano will be "the one [we] turn to for advice."