Glass Needles & Goose Quills Elementary Lessons in Atomic Properties, Nuclear Families, & Radical Poetics, considers nuclearism's place in the poetic canon by surveying its physical and spiritual toll on health and language. Braiding research, memoir, and poetry, the essay serves as a companion to the author's poetry collection Two Faint Lines in the Violet as well as a standalone primer for the poetics of social engagement.
After the untimely death of the author's father from complications of cancer, she discovers that the Massachusetts Department of Public Health had conducted an epidemiological study of the area where he lived, one located downriver from a nuclear power plant. Despite disclaimers, the study found statistically significant elevations in breast cancer, Down Syndrome, and non-Hodgkin lymphoma, the type of cancer her father had, manifesting as a brain tumor.
Caring for her father from diagnosis through death, the author recounts that, early on, he had informed her that his closest neighbor had a brain tumor, too. Growing suspicious about the proximity of the power plant to her father's home and accompanying possible health effects, she unearths evidence of numerous incidents and accidents at a plant with a storied and historic past.
A prototype for President Dwight D. Eisenhower's "Atoms for Peace" program, Yankee Nuclear Power Station in Rowe, Massachusetts began operations in 1961. The plant became the first pressurized water reactor (PWR)--as opposed to light water and boiling water types--built in New England and the third in the United States. Scheduled to be in commission for only six years, it operated for nearly 32.
When it closed in October 1991, it also became the first PWR--which by then represented the majority of U.S. reactors--to be decommissioned. Industry professionals concur that the lessons learned during that process span almost every aspect of decommissioning and determined many present-day techniques. With its request for an extension of the industry's standard 40-year operating license, Yankee Rowe also influenced the relaxation of current relicensing conventions.
The author's journey takes her from her father's hospital bedside to employment at that same hospital following his death. Working in the public relations department at New York City's renowned Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center while pursuing her MFA in poetry, she feels haunted by the past, numbed from her loss, and silenced in articulating her uncertainties by nuclear industry heavyweights and medical industry titans. Seeking to reclaim her voice through poetry, she gradually but deliberately braves bearing witness to her beliefs.
Describing the process of that reclamation in a braided essay punctuated by occasional poems, the fragmentation and vacillation of Glass Needles & Goose Quills' several storylines complicate and intensify its narrative thrust, revealing intersections in the literary, scientific, and medical arts. It also questions at what cost we continue to rely on nuclear energy by examining how disparate things leak into each other--whether by accident or design--and how power, in all definitions of the word, has profound implications on all aspects of our lives.
