“Finding Comfort in Our Insignificance: A Review of Martha Silano’s ‘This One We Call Ours’” by Lizzy Burch

Martha Silano’s 2024 Blue Lynx Prize-winning manuscript, This One We Call Ours (forthcoming from Lynx House Press), takes on grief and its whirlwind process of coming to terms with our own insignificance. Silano’s previous work includes Gravity Assist (Saturnalia Books, 2019), Reckless Lovely (Saturnalia Books, 2014), and The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception (Saturnalia Books, 2011), which won the 2010 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. Her work has been featured in New England Review, North American Review, Paris Review, and many other journals. MORIA has featured her work ten times, with pieces such as "Poppy Love" (Issue Three), “What’s Terrible” (Issue Ten), and, most recently, “John Muir Elementary” (Issue 13). Silano’s bio describes her as a poet living with a diagnosis of ALS. She also lost both her parents in the space of a few months in 2020.
Her forthcoming book manuscript starts strong with poems that use scientific references and facts to describe our insignificance as humans in a universe full of extraordinary and astronomical events. She later continues this theme in the book, along with an overarching study of the human condition, with pieces about grief, beauty, and how we coincide with the environment around us. Something we don’t come across very often and that makes Silano’s work stand out is her use of historical and scientific dates, events, facts, etc., to make her words and ideas real. In the piece “Pine Siskins,” she uses a date and percentage, then cites her source: “ . . . though how can I omit that their population / is down, since 1970, by 80%? That Allaboutbirds.com / refers to them as a common bird in steep decline.”
She chooses to open the manuscript with a list poem titled, “What They Said,” which catalogs our small presence, as humans, in the universe. It’s filled with facts like “That they’d studied four percent of the sky. / That there’s this thing called the ionosphere” and “but four percent / of the sky, but in that narrow band / to the north they found 25,000, / which means in the remaining 96% there could be close to half a million / more.” This piece orbits around black holes and event horizons — the boundary around a black hole that does not allow any light to escape — which is to say, it documents the point of no return. She makes us feel insignificant on our little blue planet as merely one out of countless galaxies of planets, but she leaves us with this suggestion of belonging: “With its 100 thousand million stars, with its 100 billion planets, with its one planet with one ocean. This one we float on, this one we call ours.” She ends by helping us feel comfort in our insignificance.
It’s difficult to choose which pieces of Silano’s to write about since each is unique and significant to her collection; however, “What is beautiful? What is sad? What is apocalyptic?” and “Poem Written One-Hundred Yards from My Mother’s Grave” speak to me the most. The questions laid out in the title of “What is beautiful? What is sad? What is apocalyptic?” provoke the reader to feel a specific way about the imagery it contains. Each line in this poem is a simple description, yet the title has already prompted you how to feel about it — it’s beautiful, it’s sad, AND it’s apocalyptic:
“The dahlia leaning over the fence like a raggedy pink mop.”
“Ms. Kester, 52, running down the road, her dog in her arms.”
“White specks swirling in the wind: / I wish that I could tell you it was snow.”
She forces the reader to dissect each line and how it fits into her designated categories.
“Poem Written One-Hundred Yards from My Mother’s Grave” gives a voice to a grieving daughter. Her mother never got to see the place where she is, nor could her mother experience the things she is. There is a universal connection to grief and fully knowing that someone is gone, but this line in particular stands out to me: “Of course, when a pileated woodpecker flies close, let’s go / a high-pitched e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e, I know it’s her / as well as I know it’s not.” My family has always considered cardinals to represent my grandfather, after he passed. We often attach animals or places to the ones we love and grieve, but Silano allows ambiguity to occupy this moment. The bird both is, and is not, her dead mother. Perhaps what we’re left with, then, is hope.
This collection gives light to how insignificant we feel when grieving and the beauty and comfort we can sometimes find in that. Silano has a way of forcing her audience to think, sitting in silence and evaluating life, of our place in it all. The way she uses factual information to ground her readers is strange and effective. Her collection offers solace to a grieving heart, knowing that “Everything Ends.”

LIZZY BURCH

Lizzy Burch graduated in 2024 from the Interdisciplinary Studies program at Woodbury University in Los Angeles. She has a concentration in film and media studies and a minor in professional writing. She is the Program Manager for MORIA Literary Magazine for Issue 13. In her free time, she travels, writes, and often reads screenplays.