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...
