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.
Anya Krugovoy Silver’s previous collections of poems include I Watched You Disappear, The Ninety-Third Name of God, From Nothing, and Second Bloom. Her work has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Best American Poetry, Five Points, Image, and Prairie Schooner. Shortly before her death in 2018, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry.