Plume

". . .quiet but damning poems on the history of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation . . ."

~John Bradley, Rain Taxi

"These poems are about delivered truth and the language of deceit. . . . Flenniken’s special combination of scientific and poetic skill gives us a powerful and readable illustration of an ongoing disaster and official attempts to pretend nothing untoward is going on."

~Mary Cresswell, Plumwood Mountain

"When it aims to, poetry can treat history in ways history books or photographs cannot: It drops us in our human skin into another time and place like no other medium. . . . Plume is difficult to put down and difficult to forget."

~Mike Dillon, City Living

"Flenniken’s award-winning collection of poems about Hanford. . . is a good way to enter the local landscape and mindset."

~Seattle Times

"Remarkable in its scope and stunning in its use of many poetic forms. . . This bold engagement with a variety of styles allows the poems to ricochet and resonate on the page as the poet’s understanding of her past life deepens, drawing the reader into an ever more complex web of personal memory and national history."

~Linda Andrews, Poetry Northwest

"Plume immerses you in an isolated society that abides by its own rules and sense of what's important."

~Mary Ann Gwinn, Seattle Times

"Plume 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."

~Susan B. A. Somes-Willett, Orion

"Not only an education about Washington State and its role in the Nuclear Age but of an awakening in the American public as well as the poet herself to the peculiar dangers of invisible poisons and of trusting too much the authorities of science and government."

~Jeannine Hall Gailey, The Rumpus

"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.'."

~Barbara Lloyd McMichael, The Bellingham Herald

"Many of the poems wrestle with the bomb factory's legacy of environmental contamination, illness and even death from exposure to radiation. But she also wrote them to honor the people she grew up with."

~Mary Ann Gwinn, The Seattle Times