Plume: Poems

Author: Kathleen Flenniken (2012)

Flenniken grew up in a community of Hanford workers in Washington state at the height of the Cold War, where "every father I knew disappeared to fuel the bomb." The author herself worked as an engineer at Hanford for three years. After the release of declassified documents contradicting the safe world she knew as a child, and the radiation-induced illnesses of family friends, Flenniken makes sense of life at Hanford in this much lauded collection of poems.