Poet Kathleen Flenniken Reads Tonight

Here she comes! The long-awaited reading from Washington State Poet Laureate Kathleen Flenniken, and the grande finale to the 2012-2013 Artsmith Salon Series. Tonight! May 14, 2013 at 6:00 pm at Darvill's Bookstore in Eastsound. The reading will be followed by an open mic.

Kathleen Flenniken's most recent poetry collection, Plume (University of Washington Press, 2012), contains "nuclear age songs of innocence and experience," based on Flenniken's childhood growing up next door to the Hanford Nuclear Reservation where her father and later Flenniken herself worked. Plutonium from Hanford was used for the nuclear bomb dropped on Nagasaki, and the site is now the most contaminated nuclear facility in the country. Flenniken's book takes readers from personal and political history to the current environmental disaster of long-term radioactive waste leaching into soil, working its way into the Columbia River, and spreading to downriver populations and eventually contaminating the world's oceans for centuries to come.

Plume video
Author website