Plume : poems / by Kathleen Flenniken.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Flenniken, Kathleen, author.

Series:

Pacific Northwest poetry series.

Pacific Northwest Poetry Series

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Nuclear energy--Poetry.

Nuclear energy.

Nuclear facilities--Washington (State)--Poetry.

Nuclear facilities.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (81 p.)

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Seattle, Washington : University of Washington Press, 2013.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

The poems in Plume are nuclear-age songs of innocence and experience set in the "empty" desert West. Award-winning poet Kathleen Flenniken grew up in Richland, Washington, at the height of the Cold War, next door to the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, where "every father I knew disappeared to fuel the bomb," and worked at Hanford herself as a civil engineer and hydrologist. By the late 1980s, declassified documents revealed decades of environmental contamination and deception at the plutonium production facility, contradicting a lifetime of official assurances to workers and their families that their community was and always had been safe. At the same time, her childhood friend Carolyn's own father was dying of radiation-induced illness: "blood cells began to err one moment efficient the next / a few gone wrong stunned by exposure to radiation / as [he] milled uranium into slugs or swabbed down / train cars or reported to B Reactor for a quick run-in / run-out." Plume, written twenty years later, traces this American betrayal and explores the human capacity to hold truth at bay when it threatens one's fundamental identity. Flenniken observes her own resistance to facts: "one box contains my childhood / the other contains his death / if one is true / how can the other be true?"The book's personal story and its historical one converge with enriching interplay and wide technical variety, introducing characters that range from Carolyn and her father to Italian physicist Enrico Fermi and Manhattan Project health physicist Herbert Parker. As a child of "Atomic City," Kathleen Flenniken brings to this tragedy the knowing perspective of an insider coupled with the art of a precise, unflinching, gifted poet.Watch the book trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iSaR9mfeeM

Contents:

""Contents""; ""Campaign Q&A, Somewhere in Oregon, May 18, 2008""; ""My Earliest Memory Preserved on Film""; ""Rattlesnake Mountain""; ""Map of Childhood""; ""A Great Physicist Recalls the Manhattan Project""; ""Bedroom Community""; ""Document Control""; ""Mosquito Truck""; ""Herb Parker Feels Like Dancing""; ""Richland Dock, 2006""; ""Days of Clotheslines""; ""Whole-Body Counter, Marcus Whitman Elementary""; ""Plume""; ""To Carolyn's Father""; ""Afternoon's Wide Horizon""; ""Redaction I""; ""Green Run""; ""Bird's Eye View""; ""Richland Dock, 1956""; ""On Cottonwood Drive""

""Self-Portrait with Father as Tour Guide""""Interlude for Dancers""; ""Redaction II""; ""Augean Suite""; ""Siren Recognition""; ""Hand and Foot Count""; ""Atomic Man""; ""Radiation!""; ""The Value of Good Design""; ""Again I'm Asked if I Glow in the Dark""; ""The Cold War""; ""Going Down""; ""Reading Wells""; ""Redaction III""; ""Deposition""; ""Song of the Secretary, Hot Lab""; ""Flow Chart""; ""Coyote""; ""Museum of Doubt""; ""Dinner with Carolyn""; ""Portrait of My Father""; ""Museum of a Lost America""; ""If You Can Read This""; ""Notes""; ""Acknowledgments""; ""About the Poet""

""A Note on the Type""

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (ebrary, viewed June 28, 2014).

ISBN:

9780295805894

0295805897

OCLC:

882550123