Plume – Poems Flenniken Paperback MV – University of Washington Press

PlumePoems\nAuthor(s): Kathleen Flenniken\nFormat: Paperback\nPublisher: University of Washington Press, United States\nImprint: University of Washington Press\nISBN-13: 9780295993904, 978-0295993904\nSynopsis\nThe 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 ]