A Review of This One We Call Ours by Martha Silano

Martha Silano’s sixth poetry collection, This One We Call Ours, stays with you long after you put it down. From the first page to the last, Silano guides the reader on a journey through the climate crisis—with each poem traveling an unexpected path to convey the consequences. Her collection grapples with the urgent question: How do we confront the climate crisis and still move through our daily lives? True to her craft, Silano offers no neat answers, only space for the reader to wonder along with her. Grief—both for humanity’s reckless treatment of the planet and for the personal loss of her mother—echoes through the collection, tempered by Silano’s deep appreciation for science and the natural world. The result is a book that balances the cataclysmic with the accessible, the playful with the serious, a collection of poems that asks us to confront our fragility without looking away.

Published in June of 2024 by Lynx House Press, This One We Call Ours, won the 2024 Blue Lynx Prize for poetry and was the twenty-seventh book of poems published in the Pacific Northwest Poetry Series. The title of the collection derives the closing lines of the prologue poem, “What They Said,” about how small and insignificant our Earth is within the universe— “With its 100 thousand million stars, / with its 100 billion planets.” Yet, Silano focuses in on the planet that matters most to us, providing gentle reverence, celebrating “This one we / float on, this one we call ours.” 

The sections of the book are organized by the seasons, though creatively reimagined to illustrate the global rise in temperature, “Carry an Inhaler, Stuck Indoors with Air Purifiers, Air Quality Index Apps Season [formerly autumn].” This choice reflects Silano’s unwillingness to downplay or poeticize the climate crisis while still including a whimsicalness in her poetry. Hauntingly specific in its portrayal of what we are up against, Silano’s work interrogates the pressing realities of our time. Consider the poem, “What is beautiful? What is sad? What is apocalyptic?” which portrays the devastating wildfires burning the West Coast:  

That some fled with important documents and mementos. That some fled
in cars that ran out of gas. That some fled their cars, ran into flames.
[...]
That in a few hours, the fire had grown to 22,000 acres. That by early evening,
it was 55,000 acres. That in one day it had traveled 17 miles.

Anaphorically repeating the word, “that,” before each heart-wrenching statement—connecting emotional appeals to striking statistics—Silano details the human and environmental costs of the fires in a way that hastens the imminence and raises the stakes. 

Living in this time in history means confronting wildfires, heat-domes, drought, flooding, and species extinction. It also means confronting the human causes for these “natural” disasters and the ways infighting and government inaction fan the literal flames. Silano signals to this most plainly in the poem “During the Cretaceous Our Country Was Divided for Sixty Million Years,” in which she cleverly weaves prehistoric science of a physical divide in the land now called the United States of America and the cultural divide of modern politics:  

On both sides of the divide, dinosaurs roamed.
On both sides earth was earth, the landscape recognizable
to the creatures on either side.

No one on the left side and no one on the right side
rubbed their eyes and said Nope, nope,
no such thing as a plesiosaur,

no such thing as a coccolithophore. The schism was literal,
not figurative. Caused by subduction, one plate colliding
into another. At the end of the Cretaceous,

the sea dried up. Now the sea is all the middle states, those who voted
red and those who voted blue. 

The metaphor of a literal sea dividing the land for the figurative chasm between ideologies brilliantly lays the groundwork for Silano to call out the absurdity of climate change denial. In this example, the imaginative use of metaphor acts as a literary device to persuade readers to consider harmful rhetoric in a new and memorable way. 

By incorporating local flora, fauna, and topography, while calling attention to the ways climate change threatens the Pacific Northwest, the collection reads like an ecopoet’s tragic love letter to her home. In “Self-Portrait as a Southern Resident Orca,” Silano embodies the critically endangered species who count on the salmon in the Salish Sea to survive, “For your ships interfere with my clicks, whistles, and pulses, with knowing / where the salmon are—species, speed, size.” It is a signature style of Silano’s to continually ground us in place—keeping us rooted, while offering a foundation of safety from which to explore uncomfortable realities. From the Southern Resident orcas to Washington apples, Douglas firs, Mount Rainier, the Duwamish River, and many other local features—Silano honors the unparalleled beauty of the Northwest while reminding us of all we have to lose.

The thread of grief—grieving her mother and grieving our Mother Earth—binds the collection into a cohesive whole. While certain poems offer moments of pause and reprieve, Silano repeatedly guides us back to this central ache, this grief. Poets often give us language for how to move through the impossible thing we call grief and Silano’s ability to find these words is a gift to readers. In “I Love the World,” the speaker recognizes that grief is the price we pay for love. How even when we lose the unique love of a mother—there are moments of solace: 

Even after I saw a photo

of my mother’s casket draped with grandmother’s quilt,
I still loved hearing about the field of white daisies
down the road from her grave.

Here Silano provides consolation within juxtaposition—the dark image of a casket joined with the lightness of daisies. Their proximity bringing comfort to the speaker. And perhaps this is how we’re meant to live in these unprecedented times—finding peace within the grief, quiet in the storm, and wisdom in the chaos.

Tackling the most important issues of this moment in history notwithstanding, Silano’s work truly shines in the specificity of her imagery. Absorbing this collection is more like observing paintings than reading poems. In the penultimate poem, “We Are All Magnificent,” each word is a brushstroke of color, moving from red to vivid yellow: “We say goodbye / to the bleeding hearts, welcome poppies the color of yolks. / As the goldfinches molt from ashen to lemon, we are the lemons, / the wonder of citrus.” Within these lines our senses awaken. We see bright poppies, hear chirping finches while touching their soft feathers, taste tart lemon, and smell sharp citrus. Silano is a master at showing, not telling, which cultivates a rich, tangible experience for the reader. 

In facing climate change and grief, Silano’s lyricism and wit serve as headlights in what can feel like overwhelming darkness. But while the poet provides soothing balm along with hard truths, it’s not enough to let us off the hook—we come away deeply impacted, likely outraged, and maybe even compelled to act. Even if there is no comfort of resolution on the last page of This One We Call Ours, Silano’s offering of hope may lie in our insignificance in the collective universe. As the final poem “Everything Ends” reminds us, “Because pleasure / counts big time. Because days spent in a tender mess / are unrecoverable,” we understand even if the fate of humans is dire it’s important to look directly at it—and directly towards the small pleasures only available on this planet we call ours.