Sumario: | "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.
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