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The Manhattan Project

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  • Author: Hunt, Ken
    Date:
    Created
    2020
    Summary:

    The hands of humans split the atom and reshaped the world. Gradually revealing a sublime nightmare that begins with spontaneous nuclear fission in the protozoic and ends with the omnicide of the human race, The Manhattan Project traces the military, cultural, and scientific history of the development of nuclear weapons and nuclear power through searing lyric, procedural, and visual poetry. Ken Hunt's poetry considers contemporary life--life in the nuclear age--broadly and deeply. It dances through the liminal zones between routine and disaster, between life and death, between creation and destruction. From the mundane to the extraordinary, Hunt's poems expose the depth to which the nuclear has impacted every aspect of the everyday, and question humanity's ability to avoid our destruction. Challenging the complicity of the scientists who created devastating weapons, exploring the espionage of the nuclear arms race, and exposing the role of human error in nuclear disaster, The Manhattan Project is a necropastoral exploration of the literal and figurative fallout of the nuclear age. These poems wail like a meltdown siren, condemning anthropocentric thinking for its self-destructive arrogance.

    Contents:
    • Intro
    • the atoms we cleave
    • the arms race
    • below oklo
    • ideal isotopes
    • critical mass
    • thuringia
    • trinity
    • ghosts of los alamos
    • valles caldera
    • industrial complex
    • military incidents
    • dull swords
    • broken arrows
    • bent spear
    • empty quivers
    • faded giants
    • nucflash
    • rain of ruin
    • clear skies
    • operation epsilon
    • contamination
    • the east ural reserve
    • the argonne incident
    • the human factor
    • rising water
    • doomsday machines
    • antimatter
    • strangelet
    • red mercury
    • destroyers of worlds
    • fallout
    • Acknowledgments
    Original Publisher: Calgary, Alberta, University of Calgary Press
    Language(s): English
    ISBN: 9781773850559, 1773850555, 9781773850566, 1773850563
    Collection(s)/Series: Read Alberta Ebooks