Gravity Assist

By Martha Silano

Gravity Assist, the newest collection by Martha Silano, masterfully measures the heights and depths of our earthly visions. Cerebral yet meditative, capacious yet focused, this book soars with investigations and ruminations, love letters, origin stories, and notes on gravitational forces both literal and metaphorical. Through her usual nimble style, Silano deftly weaves the humanistic and the cosmic, delivering a series of up-close and personal examinations of phenomena as far flung as copepods, nebula, trilobites, preening cormorants, or "Reaching out to soothe you, /the twisted arms of the last of three species of endemic /sea stars ripping themselves apart, arms crawling away in opposite directions, insides spilling out."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Saturnalia Books
• Release date: Mar 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781947817012

Book preview

I. Periapsis

Here I am,

weed-whacking with a spatula

flipping hash browns with an emory board

filing my nails with a knife

Suddenly I know precisely

what to do with these tears

though already they’re smoldering

Here I am

hedge clipping

the wine-stained flutes

shard-scatter like a flock

of merlin-shocked sanderlings

With a needle I’m digging up

the something stupid I said

to the sand crabs

to the rising tide

Here I am

with the spoke before I thought

with the sizzling sea

with this most unhelpful implement

Despite Nagging Malfunctions

I was born with a stainless-steel spoon, licked it

through bloomer-less somersaults, asbestos tiles

unleashing from cafeteria ceilings, through lectures

teeming with chalky arrows of inscrutable vectors.

To revive me I was given Halicephalobus mephisto,

nematode residing in the sulfurous dark of the TauTona

gold mine, mephisto in honor of Mephistopheles,

he who loves not the light. In lieu of high