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
