Nance Van Winckel's wry, provocative slant on the world and her command of images and ideas enliven these stunning poems. Presented in two parts, Pacific Walkers first gives imagined voice to anonymous dead individuals, entries in the John Doe network of the Spokane County Medical Examiner's Records. The focus then shifts to named but now-forgotten individuals in a discarded early-1900s photo album purchased in a secondhand store. We encounter figures devoid of history but enduring among us as lockered remains, and figures who come with histories--first names and dates, and faces preserved in photographs--but who no longer belong to anyone.
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: "blood cells began to err one moment efficient the next / a few gone wrong stunned by exposure to radiation / as [he] milled uranium into slugs or swabbed down / train cars or reported to B Reactor for a quick run-in / run-out." 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. Flenniken observes her own resistance to facts: "one box contains my childhood / the other contains his death / if one is true / how can the other be true?" The book's personal story and its historical one converge with enriching interplay and wide technical variety, introducing characters that range from Carolyn and her father to Italian physicist Enrico Fermi and Manhattan Project health physicist Herbert Parker. As a child of "Atomic City," Kathleen Flenniken brings to this tragedy the knowing perspective of an insider coupled with the art of a precise, unflinching, gifted poet. Watch the book trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iSaR9mfeeM
Laguna Beach became famous as an artists' colony in the 1920s, infamous as a mecca for hippies and surfers in the 1960s, and it still attracts free spirits and seekers of beauty. Among those inspired by its light, landscape, and people is poet Sarah Koops Vanderveen. In Once by the Pacific, she captures the rhythms of real life in a much-mythologized place that is ultimately, in her words, quirky, lovely, and authentic. Includes work by world-renowned photographer John Van Hamersveld.
"Iep jāltok is a collection of poetry by a young Marshallese woman highlighting the traumas of her people through colonialism, racism, forced migration, the legacy of nuclear testing by America, and the impending threats of climate change"--Provided by publisher.
Includes folk poetry from Hawaii, Samoa, Tonga, the Society Islands, the Tuamotus, the Marquesas, Easter Island, Mangareva, Cook Islands, Tuvalu, Kapingamarangi, Tikopia, and New Zealand.
"Post romantic, the twenty-first volume in the Pacific Northwest poetry series, is published with the generous support of Cynthia Lovelace Sears"--Title page verso.
The second anthology of California verse, published shortly after the first, Outcroppings, and issued as a rival to it by Hubert H. Bancroft. May Wentworth is the pseudonym of Mary Richardson Newman Dolliver.
