Terminal Surreal: An Interview with Martha Silano

Terminal Surreal: An Interview with Martha Silano, about Her New Collection, (out from Acre Books, 2025)

* Some of you may know that Martha Silano, friend of a friend of The Poetry Salon, has been diagnosed with Terminal ALS. While Martha wasn’t able to be a full-featured poet with us this month, she has graciously shared her book with me and given me an interview-in-writing, which you can read below.

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TPS: Tell me about the genesis of this book. How did you start and when did you know it was finished?

MS: Terminal Surreal began with my diagnosis—late 2023. It was a way for me to process what was and would happen to my body, but to be honest a good chunk of my brain didn’t quite believe I really had ALS – I think that’s how I managed to write poems like “When I Learn Catastrophically,” “Is this My Last Ferry Trip?,” “Self-Elegies,” and “Abecedarian with ALS.” A few poems were written before I knew I had ALS but was experiencing—muscle spasms and these things I now know are fasciculations (when a nerve twitches).

I was hoping all my mysterious symptoms were anything but ALS. I did the Grind (where you are grouped with others via email and post a new poem draft or revision daily) in January, February, and March 2024, and the drafts and revisions from those three months gave me about half the book. In May, I sent it out as a chapbook, then pushed to get it to around fifty pages. I then sent it to Acre Books during their open reading period in May 2024, and heard a month later it had been accepted. I had never put a book together so quickly, and by then I was already in bad enough shape that the amazing editor, Lisa Ampleman, put the book into sections and did the arrangement for me (I was having trouble looking at screens).

I guess Terminal Surreal was officially finished about a month ago, when my partner Langdon Cook and Lisa did the final edits, and sent Lisa one last poem, "Abecedarian by the Crazy Lady with ALS.” I asked for it to be added, and she said yes!

TPS: Who were/are some of your major influences in writing this?

MS: That’s a tough question. I do not feel like anyone or anything influenced the writing of this book. I was forced to look deeply into my own perceptions and feelings about having a terminal neurological illness, and to do my best to render it in my own voice and style, sharing what it was like for me with humor, musicality, and an honesty I hoped would help others who are struggling with an incurable illness … or even a curable one, or any disability—but while writing the poems my task was to get into words (often daily) what was happening to my body, my kids, my spouse—like the day I realized I’d likely have to kill myself, like the moment I came to accept and be at peace with being the first of my close friends to die.

TPS: Which poem was easiest for you to write and why? (Please include the full text of the poem here.)

Many of the poems “fell out of me.” By this I mean I felt like I was not in charge of what my fingers were typing. Many of these poems were written in one sitting, then sent to a poet friend, often the poet Barbara Ungar, for minor editing. Probably the easiest one to write was “When I Learn Catastrophically,” which will appear in Best American Poetry 2025.

TPS: Which poem was hardest to write and why? How did you ultimately finish it. Is there an editing tool that helped? What did you learn as a person and a poet by tackling this poem? (Please include the full text of the poem here.)

Probably “Possible Diagnosis,” which appeared in The Shore because it was the first poem consciously written about a diagnosis I wasn’t even ready to name. I wrote it in early December 2023, a few days after spitting into a tube to find out if my brand of ALS was genetic. I didn’t use an editing tool, and it wasn’t that it was difficult to get the words on the page, but that I was crying as I realized this was going to be the topic I’d be focused on for the remainder of my life.

Possible Diagnosis

What’s that stone, that one stone edging
toward the edge? In Italian, for spider,
say ragno. Say web 
in a musical spell. I was with a friend,
on my last round. When I told her
I might be dying, 

she was my dictator of snow, holding me
and my gone-berserk nerves.
I told her my mother 

puts the relevant clues in crossword puzzles:
Riley, refs, and palomas. Isn’t she
the best cheerer-upper ever? 

Maybe I’m a witch for the drama cauldron,
maybe I just need more sleep, more
nooky, cookies-n-cream. 

Old and unheavy, in need of rest. God?
I don’t quite believe, but at night
I let myself go fetal, 

hands pressed like that plastic pair Svennie found
at a thrift store in Shelton. To breathe.
To swallow. Now I understand: 

incurable might not be the worst thing. Upsides, like creasing
the cloth napkins, carrying them down to their home
in a living room drawer, 

admiring the spotted towhee making a ruckus in dead leaves.
I thought it would be like a thumb coming down
on a spider’s body, but it was not.

TPS: Tell me about the cover art. Why did you choose it? What do you hope it communicates?

Barbara Bourgoyne is the in-house cover designer for Acre Books. I was given a few images to choose from. I love anything purple and the juxtaposition of a Death’s head hawkmoth and an orchid made me really happy. I hope it communicates the surreal condition of knowing you will die, and the continuance of life despite this awful truth. That there is a Death’s head hawkmoth, well, that rocked my world! Also, I studied orchids in college and have always had a particular fondness for them … especially that they imitate the sex organs of bees to trick them into copulating with a flower, thus accomplishing the mission of spreading the orchids’ pollen. It feels like the perfect cover image for the book, and I am grateful to Barbara Bourgoyne for her deep understanding of the contents of Terminal Surreal.

Want to write with us? Scroll down to see what workshops and events are coming up this month.

Workshop Description
How do we write poetry about the natural world in a time of climate crisis? In the introduction to 100 Poems to Save the Earth, editors Zoe Brigley and Kristian Evans write: "Poetry calls us to stay awake, to find the words to describe how it feels, to sing to what hurts, to reach out, to attend more closely and with more care, to each other, and to our fellow species, to see all things as our kin." We'll read and discuss poems by a variety of contemporary ecopoets to gain perspective and inspiration, then draft our own poems in support of the more than human world.

About the Instructor
Joanne durham is the author of To Drink from a Wider Bowl, winner of the Sinclair Poetry Prize from Evening Street Press, and the chapbook, On Shifting Shoals, from Kelsay Books. Awards include the Miriam Chaikin Poetry Prize, the Mary Ruffin Poole Prize from the NC Poetry Society, 3 Pushcart Prize nominations and she has been a finalist in numerous other contests. Her poetry appears in Poetry South, Poetry East, CALYX, Vox Populi, James Crews' anthology, The Wonder of Small Things, and many other journals and anthologies. She lives on the North Carolina coast, with the ocean as her backyard, muse, and source of equanimity in difficult times.

Workshop Description

“Sometimes the little times you don't think are anything while they're happening turn out to be what marks a whole period of your life.” -- Andy Warhol

“We are not just Art for Michelangelo to carve, he can't rewrite the agro of my furied heart-- Lady Gaga

Our Pop Culture is determined by the everyday signs we give each other—the music we listen to, clothes and fashions we wear, the slang we use, greeting rituals, gifts we buy. Pop Culture are those ubiquitous icons that follow us in our lives. Pop Culture can both a blessing and a curse to the finer Art forms, as it can be full of schlock and cheap thrills. But when used selectively as a tool in writing, pop culture can be a playful and aesthetic device to deploy that narrative arc in the work. Because these iconic things in our world are metaphors and symbols for the complexity and dimension of any story or human situation. These iconic talismans can mark history, personal and otherwise, tell us where we were and what time period and what political climate?—all cues and important references the writer plants seeds for the reader. We all bring a context, and Pop Culture to the narrative, and allows us to make associations, and useful ‘mind tags.’ Blurring the lines of Art and artifice, we will aim for the finer craft and aesthetics--with an eye towards image, metaphor, tone and craft.