Synopses & Reviews
Award-winning poet Debora Greger grew up in Washington near the site of the Hanford atomic plant, which, unbeknownst to its workers, manufactured plutonium for the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. “The high school team was named the Bombers,” she writes. “The school ring had a mushroom cloud on it.” In
Desert Fathers, Uranium Daughters she uses what
The Nation has characterized as her “deadpan wit, intelligence and marvelous insight” to explore the legacy of a Catholic girlhood spent in a landscape where “even the dust, though we didn’t know it then, was radioactive.”
“Call us out of the animal,” Greger writes, invoking the ghost of a poet conjured in “Nights of 1995,” in what could be construed as the motto of a collection filled with what Poetry called “priceless instants where the mundane flares up into the miraculous.”
About the Author
Debora Greger is a poet and professor who has won grants and awards from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim foundation. Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, and Paris Review.
Table of Contents
Desert Fathers, Uranium Daughters The Landscape of Memory
Adam's Daughter
The Desert Fathers: The Flagpole-Sitter
The Age of Reason
Andante pastorale
The Blessing of the Throats
Memories of the Atomic Age
Ship Burial
Lives of the North American Martyrs
Northwest Passage
A Brief History of Blasphemy for the Feast of the Assumption
The Cloud of Unknowing
Psyche and Eros in Flordia
Nights of 1995
Ovid at Land's End
Bureau de change
Sunday at the Ruins
In the Eternal City
The Love of Ruins
Keats in Ohio
The Flea Market at the End of History
Much Too Late
The Patron Saint of Venice
I Dinosauri di Venezia
The Body Translated into Heaven
The Further Travels of Marco Polo
In the Museum of the Eighteenth Century
Il Diluvio universale (particolare)
A Return to Earth
The Desert Father
Mass in B Minor