Blue Positive

It's three days before the new year. I enjoy looking back and looking forward. When I found out about Janus, I was quite pleased there was a God who did the same. 



When I shared with my husband, he said "doesn't that mean he was two-faced?" But no, Janus isn't about talking behind someone's back. He is, according to Wikipedia, "the god of beginnings, gates, transitions, time, duality, doorways, passages, and endings. Usually depicted as having two faces. he looks to the future and to the past." 

This is why I love January, the month named after the god who presides over beginnings and endings.

In the U.S., so much needs to come to an end. So much needs to begin anew. I think you know what I mean.

Personally, I am saying goodbye to some things, and I am saying hello to some others. Thus, I am very optimistic about the coming year.

I hope you are too. 

At long last, I have a website, and here's the address marthasilano.net. Here you will find all sorts of info about my books, plus links to poems and upcoming readings/classes. Check it out!

First three people to follow me on Twitter will receive a free copy of Reckless Lovely, including FREE shipping/postage. No strings attached. Happy spring!

https://giveaway.amazon.com/p/adec40aab868bb6d

So, this week Poetry published one of my poems.

One of my favorite parts about completing a poem is going back and having a gander at the handwritten first drafts.

Call me a weirdo, but I enjoy seeing just how awful my early drafts often (always!) are. Also, I like seeing how a poem evolves, (in most cases, but not always) improves, with research, with fiddling, with reading aloud, with seemingly endless tinkering.

We, my family and I, were on an early morning commuter train. Over the river and through the woods to grandmother's house we go? Nope,  more like through the Rainier Valley to SeaTac, to a condo in Florida.

Suitcases stacked by the closing doors. Kids running around to find the best seat, and me, with this crazy notion to begin a poem.

A hearty shout-out to Maggie Trapp for her generous review of Reckless Lovely, which just went live at The Los Angeles Review blog.

Makes the perfect holiday gift!

A fast train to heaven ... or?

There are many decisions regarding where to hang out and/or spend your $$ for gifts this holiday season, but what better place than your local independent bookstore, Elliott Bay Books? There's a cafe in-store with delish yummies and drinks, plus tons of books to browse, and many cozy chairs.

Just in time for the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, I will be emceeing and reading with Lorraine Healy, Suzanne Paola, and Annette Spauling-Convy from St. Peter's B-List, Contemporary Poems Inspired by the Saints, a spirited and compelling poetry anthology edited by Mary Ann B. Miller and published by Ave Maria Press earlier this year.

As the title suggests, this collection focuses on contemporary responses to saints, from the well-known variety to the obscure. Speaking of  obscure, Alice Friman's contribution, "Seeing the Sights," tells of  a holy woman named Vilgefortis, Saint Starosta, aka the bearded saint:
                                                         There she is
nailed to her five-o'clock shadow. / No weeping mother. No deposition. / No miracle in the tomb. She dangles / in her side-show getup, beyond tweezers / or depilatories, electrolysis or laser, /
forty bucks a shot. Grind golden scissors, / strop a magic blade. It will do not good. This is God's hair, tough as wire, / inspired as twisted nails.

Poems by Edward Hirsch, Dana Gioia, Brian Doyle, Erika Meitner, Martin Espada, Jim Daniels, Franz Wright, Mary Karr, Kelli Russell-Agodon, Susan Blackwell Ramsey, Rebecca Lauren, Sarah J. Sloat, C. Dale Young, J. D. Schraffenberger, and many other fine poets grace these pages with tales of the forlorn to the fabulous. One of my favorites, "Shopping for Miracles: Lourdes, 1979," by Alan Bereka, gets to the root of why this is my kind of saint anthology:

I returned  to the States with a glass flask
filled with holy water which I gave 
to my mother ... she remained 
bedridden and continued to say the rosary
through her pain every day until this died.

In a similar fashion, Kelli Russell Agodon's speaker, in "Being Called Back," welcomes both the priest and the medic:

I know the priest would come,
     offer everlasting life and pray
over my body, but I'm betting

on the medic, the EMT, the blonde girl
    who works weekends at the fire station
to keep her daughter in private school. 

That this book would include poems so utterly doubting the power of faith is testament to its democratic approach, an admirable quality in a book that could have ended up being one-sided, preachy, dogmatic: too damn devout for its own good. Maybe it's that the editor knows there are saints in our malls and parking lots, staying up for us in fire stations, picking up our trash. They may never be recognized by the Catholic Church, and yet no one questions their ability to save us.

If you live in the area and want a taste of the thought-provoking poems that await you, come down to Elliott Bay Books in Seattle on December 8, at 7 pm, and listen to four contributors read their own work as well as their favorites from the book.