Plume : poems
"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]. 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."--Back cover
Poetry
1 online resource (70 pages) : illustrations
9780295805894, 0295805897
882550123
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, 1956On Cottonwood DriveSelf-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 LabFlow 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