Martha Silano received her BA from Grinnell College and her MFA from the University of Washington. Her first book, What the Truth Tastes Like, won the William & Kingman Page Poetry Book Award and was published by Nightshade Press in 1999. Her poems have appeared in the Paris Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Prairie Schooner, Bellingham Review, and Fine Madness, among others. Nominated twice for a Pushcart prize, Martha teaches at Edmonds and Bellevue Community Colleges.

About Blue Positive:

"Martha Silano's poems are full of sex and birth and food, mind and body. Their richness of detail makes reading this book like entering a home: there is a bustle to her language as she tries to gather everything she loves. Silano writes, 'I'm surprised how the trees keep themselves/from falling, how mostly stable this sloping, unpredictable earth.' By the end of Blue Positive, I trust both her surprise and her wisdom."
—Bob Hicok

"These are exuberant, humorous poems, bursting with love of language, the body, and deep play. Pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering are central to Blue Positive, and here Silano’s eye is especially fresh and original: 'The cosmos dances, // but an embryo? I see her more / as taking up shop, blow torch in one hand, // jack hammer in the other.' (from Begging to Differ) Harborview is a harrowing poem about post-partum depression, where we learn 'some god’s gotten hold of me.' But Silano shows us how a bright and ultimately optimistic sensibility can overcome disaster. As she tells us in a delightful crown of sonnets written for her son, 'I try to laugh at what I can’t control.' In these fine poems Martha Silano takes us 'over Niagara without the barrel,' to a place where 'Salvaging Just Might Lead to Salvation.'"
—Peter Pereira