Synopses & Reviews
Winner of the 2013 Washington State Book Award and finalist for the 2013 William Carlos Williams Award, Poetry Society of America
"Quiet but damning poems on the history of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation." - Rain Taxi
"Plume is an excellent example of how documentary poetry can blend the personal impulse toward nostalgia with the journalistic imperative for objectivity, and the result is a stunning multifaceted take on this public tragedy." - Orion
"Washington State's new Poet Laureate Kathleen Flenniken gives an elegantly rendered example of another of [John] Morgan's dicta that 'poetry gives form to our feelings and helps us come to terms with them.'" - Bellingham Herald
"Many of the poems wrestle with the bomb factory's legacy of environmental contamination, illness and even death from exposure to radiation. But [Flenniken] also wrote them to honor the people she grew up with." - Seattle Times
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. 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.
Review
"Definitely a book of poems most Tri-Citians will identify with, especially since they tie in with the nuclear age with poem titles like 'Atomic Man' and 'Radiation.'" -Dori O'Neal, Tri-City Herald, December 21, 2013
Review
"These poems are about delivered truth and the language of deceit. . . . Flenniken's special combination of scientific and poetic skill gives us a powerful and readable illustration of an ongoing disaster and official attempts to pretend nothing untoward is going on." -Mary Cresswell, Plumwood Mountain, March 2014
Synopsis
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.