The Ninety-Third Name of God

"Gorgeously lush, Anya Silver's poetry is a confrontation with mortality and in particular the survivor's felt loss of womanliness that can accompany breast cancer. God visits the poet, she says, only when she has `lain back for the burning of my skin, covered my face and cursed.' This is an extraordinarily beautiful book, passionate and intense; it reveres life in all its forms and language in all its grace. Her poems breathe the light of God's name."---Kelly Cherry

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.

"These poems reveal the word made flesh---incarnate experiences cracked open to light, celebrations of the meaning found in suffering and in healing, in death and in birth. From the bald sisterhood of women with breast cancer to the cleaving loss of an unborn child, from the jubilant `Canticle of the Washing Machine' to a love song based on the metaphor of French toast, these are poems about the private and the public worlds of women, worlds infused with the luminosity and inscrutable nature of God."---Jill Baumgaertner