In her third collection, From Nothing, Anya Krugovoy Silver follows a mother, wife, and artist as illness and loss of loved ones disrupt the peaceful flow of life. Grounded in the traditions of meditative and contemplative poetry, From Nothing confronts disease and mortality with the healing possibilities of verse. Whether remembering the sound of whispered secrets on a family vacation or celebrating a favorable PET scan, in Silver’s keen observations of seemingly mundane moments we glimpse the divine. As she addresses profound questions about how to make meaning out of suffering, Silver’s poems attest to the power of art to help us face difficult realities in an often painful world. “I’m ransacked by the pain and love and urgency of this book. These aren’t pretty, redemptive poems about cancer and loss; they're gritty oracles that divide joint from marrow as we stand before coffins, stillbirths, and mastectomy scars. This is one of few poets just brazen enough to be human. In short, Anya Silver doesn’t screw around.”—Tania Runyan, author of Second Sky and A Thousand Vessels
Anya Krugovoy Silver’s debut collection considers the flawed and gaudy flesh as it turns toward a beloved’s embrace, toward the surgeon’s knife. Her poems both celebrate the sensual world and seek to transcend the body’s limitations through encounters with art, memory, and the divine. At once imagistic, lyrical, and meditative, Silver’s verse begins in the personal sphere and then looks outward toward the wider human experiences of illness, faith, fear, and love. From chemotherapy to doing laundry, from observation of deformed pussy willows to contemplation of the word “girl,” Silver does not shrink from life’s “blazonry of loss.” Instead, she ultimately affirms the possibility of praise and joy.
In Second Bloom, Silver looks unflinchingly and honestly at the suffering of cancer, while at the same time celebrating the possibility of joy, the persistence of beauty and love, the simultaneous winnowing and comfort of faith. These poems are contemplative and often personal, but reach out to the world as a whole: from IV poles to hula hoops, from riding a roller coaster with one's son to comforting a dying friend at Christmas. The poems glean their subject matter from ordinary life, from art, from the natural world. Silver's poetry attempts to preserve the world's luminous moments and to hold grace and despair simultaneously in the human heart.
Passionately written and perfectly crafted, Anya Krugovoy Silver's poems help us to view life through a different lens. In I Watched You Disappear, she offers meditations on sickness but also celebrations of art, motherhood, and family, as well as a sequence of poems based on the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. Throughout her collection, Silver examines feelings of pain, anger, and urgency caused by a serious illness and presents the struggle to cope in a lyrical and moving way. Never overwhelmed by her own mortality, Silver manages to speak with beauty and grace about a terrifying subject. In her poems based on Grimm's fairy tales, Silver subtly and surprisingly interweaves retellings of these tales with reflections on life and death. Infinitely touching, engaging, and finely tuned, Silver's poems invite us to look at the lives we love in new and profound ways.
Anya Krugovoy Silver’s debut collection considers the flawed and gaudy flesh as it turns toward a beloved’s embrace, toward the surgeon’s knife. Her poems both celebrate the sensual world and seek to transcend the body’s limitations through encounters with art, memory, and the divine. At once imagistic, lyrical, and meditative, Silver’s verse begins in the personal sphere and then looks outward toward the wider human experiences of illness, faith, fear, and love. From chemotherapy to doing laundry, from observation of deformed pussy willows to contemplation of the word “girl,” Silver does not shrink from life’s “blazonry of loss.” Instead, she ultimately affirms the possibility of praise and joy.
In her third collection, From Nothing, Anya Krugovoy Silver follows a mother, wife, and artist as illness and loss of loved ones disrupt the peaceful flow of life. Grounded in the traditions of meditative and contemplative poetry, From Nothing confronts disease and mortality with the healing possibilities of verse. Whether remembering the sound of whispered secrets on a family vacation or celebrating a favorable PET scan, in Silver’s keen observations of seemingly mundane moments we glimpse the divine. As she addresses profound questions about how to make meaning out of suffering, Silver’s poems attest to the power of art to help us face difficult realities in an often painful world. “I’m ransacked by the pain and love and urgency of this book. These aren’t pretty, redemptive poems about cancer and loss; they're gritty oracles that divide joint from marrow as we stand before coffins, stillbirths, and mastectomy scars. This is one of few poets just brazen enough to be human. In short, Anya Silver doesn’t screw around.”—Tania Runyan, author of Second Sky and A Thousand Vessels
Saint Agnostica is the final work of Anya Krugovoy Silver, a poet celebrated for her incisive writing about illness, motherhood, and Christian faith. The poems in this collection dance between opposite poles of joy and grief, community and isolation, humor and anger, belief and doubt, in moving and devastating witness to a life lived with strength and resolve.
In Second Bloom, Silver looks unflinchingly and honestly at the suffering of cancer, while at the same time celebrating the possibility of joy, the persistence of beauty and love, the simultaneous winnowing and comfort of faith. These poems are contemplative and often personal, but reach out to the world as a whole: from IV poles to hula hoops, from riding a roller coaster with one's son to comforting a dying friend at Christmas. The poems glean their subject matter from ordinary life, from art, from the natural world. Silver's poetry attempts to preserve the world's luminous moments and to hold grace and despair simultaneously in the human heart.
Passionately written and perfectly crafted, Anya Krugovoy Silver's poems help us to view life through a different lens. In I Watched You Disappear, she offers meditations on sickness but also celebrations of art, motherhood, and family, as well as a sequence of poems based on the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. Throughout her collection, Silver examines feelings of pain, anger, and urgency caused by a serious illness and presents the struggle to cope in a lyrical and moving way. Never overwhelmed by her own mortality, Silver manages to speak with beauty and grace about a terrifying subject. In her poems based on Grimm's fairy tales, Silver subtly and surprisingly interweaves retellings of these tales with reflections on life and death. Infinitely touching, engaging, and finely tuned, Silver's poems invite us to look at the lives we love in new and profound ways.
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