The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception: Poems
Silano's poems describe earthy, domesticated realities--a spat with a spouse, wiping a baby's nose, garbage bags at the curb--against the largest imaginable backdrop of cosmic and geological infinities, scientific theories & technologies.  Her poems are optical illusions in which the eye sees first a cat or woman's face, then a mountain range or constellation, & finally recognizes them as both.  As Campbell McGrath, who selected Silano's book as the winner of the 2010 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize comments, she is "comic and wise, quotidian and celestial." - David Graham, Verse Wisconsin 107.I honestly see our new American Vallejo in Martha Silano, one to offer us both hope and outrage against this new bloody century."                                                             --Sean Thomas Dougherty"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"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