Plume: Poems

by Kathleen Flenniken

Overview

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

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780295993904
Publisher:	University of Washington Press
Publication date:	10/11/2013
Series:	Pacific Northwest Poetry Series
Pages:	80
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.30(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Kathleen Flenniken is the author of two poetry collections: Plume (University of Washington Press, 2012), a meditation on the Hanford Nuclear Site and her hometown of Richland, Washington, won the Washington State Book Award and was a finalist for the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America and the Pacific Northwest Book Awards. Her first book, Famous (University of Nebraska Press, 2006), won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and was named a Notable Book by the American Library Association. Kathleen’s awards include a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Artist Trust. She served as Washington State Poet Laureate from 2012 to 2014. Kathleen holds an MFA degree in creative writing from Pacific Lutheran University, as well as bachelor’s and master’s degrees in civil engineering. She lives in Seattle.

Table of 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

What People are Saying About This

Sharon Bryan

"The beautifully wrought poems in Plume are as well—tuned morally as they are musically. And their lamentations are epic: hubris and its disastrous consequences, love and betrayal, human folly, human fragility. . . . Plume is an enormously important and moving work of art."

Editorial Reviews

". . .quiet but damning poems on the history of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation . . ."

Rain Taxi - John Bradley

"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 - Susan B. A. Somes-Willett

"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."

Plumwood Mountain - Mary Cresswell

Flenniken’s award-winning collection of poems about Hanford. . . is a good way to enter the local landscape and mindset.

Seattle Times

". . .quiet but damning poems on the history of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation . . ."—John Bradley, Rain Taxi

"When it aims to, poetry can treat history in ways history books or photographs cannot: It drops us in our human skin into another time and place like no other medium. . . . Plume is difficult to put down and difficult to forget."—Mike Dillon, City Living, April 2012

"Remarkable in its scope and stunning in its use of many poetic forms. . . This bold engagement with a variety of styles allows the poems to ricochet and resonate on the page as the poet's understanding of her past life deepens, drawing the reader into an ever more complex web of personal memory and national history."—Linda Andrews, Poetry Northwest, December 2013

"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."—Susan B. A. Somes-Willett, Orion, November/December 2012

"Not only an education about Washington State and its role in the Nuclear Age but of an awakening in the American public as well as the poet herself to the peculiar dangers of invisible poisons and of trusting too much the authorities of science and government."—Jeannine Hall Gailey, The Rumpus, May 2012

"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.'."—Barbara Lloyd McMichael, The Bellingham Herald, March 2012

"Many of the poems wrestle with the bomb factory's legacy of environmental contamination, illness and even death from exposure to radiation. But she also wrote them to honor the people she grew up with."—Mary Ann Gwinn, The Seattle Times, April 2012

"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

From the Publisher

"Remarkable in its scope and stunning in its use of many poetic forms. . . This bold engagement with a variety of styles allows the poems to ricochet and resonate on the page as the poet’s understanding of her past life deepens, drawing the reader into an ever more complex web of personal memory and national history."

Poetry Northwest - Linda Andrews

"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.'."

The Bellingham Herald - Barbara Lloyd McMichael

"When it aims to, poetry can treat history in ways history books or photographs cannot: It drops us in our human skin into another time and place like no other medium. . . . Plume is difficult to put down and difficult to forget."

City Living - Mike Dillon