Acre Books

This unflinching poetry collection follows the author’s diagnosis with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).   In her masterful poetry collection Terminal Surreal, Martha Silano confronts the reality of mortality with gorgeous attention to imagery and scene. The book follows a trajectory from early symptoms before diagnosis with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) to full-blown illness and its effects on friends and family, including her children, who appear in poems like “After Dropping My Son Off at College” and “My Nineteen-Year-Old Daughter Is My Personal Assistant.” With a devoted naturalist’s eye, Silano revels in birds, trees, and flowers in a way that reminds readers we are connected to the world around us. The book touches on the medical, the metaphysical, and even the cosmological (through encounters in medical offices and on a moon of Mars). With Nutter Butters and Lorna Doones, abecedarians and self-elegies, Silano’s singular, feisty, contemporary voice propels these poems of grief and acceptance as they explore the transformational power of art. When I Learn Catastrophically is an anagram of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. When I learn I probably have a couple years, maybe (catastrophically) less, crossword puzzles begin to feel meaningless, though not the pair of mergansers, not the red cardinal of my heart. The sky does all sorts of marvelously uncatastrophic things that winter I shimmy between science & song, between widgeons & windows, weather & its invitation to walk. Walking, which becomes my lose less, my less morsels, my lose smile while more sore looms. . . .

A remarkable debut collection that chronicles the experience of anxiety and anguish in the face of COVID-19. As a front-line physician, M. Cynthia Cheung started writing poetry during the worst days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Her remarkable debut collection, Common Disaster, chronicles these experiences. Confronting not just the coronavirus but also war crimes and the death of loved ones, Cheung shows us that the pandemic is only one of many disasters we hold in common. In poems that look to both the past and future, she takes a stand against the extinction of self and memory, challenging the violence of erasure. The period covered by the book is geologic and vast. It examines present-day evidence of ancient human activity and natural history, including the Lascaux caves, asteroid craters, tar pits, and Viking ruins. The poems include ghazals, thoughtful free verse, and work that takes up the page in reframing classical Chinese oracular texts to situate the pain of a doctor in crisis. As a physician-poet, Cheung asks us to see beyond the every day to the devastating truths about the human condition.