Winner of the 2013 Washington State Book Award and finalist for the 2013 William Carlos Williams Award, Poetry Society of America<p>"Quiet but damning poems on the history of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation." <i> - Rain Taxi</i><p>"<i>Plume</i> 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." <i> - Orion</i><p>"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.'" <i> - Bellingham Herald</i><p>"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." <i> - Seattle Times</i><p>The poems in <i>Plume</i> 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.