Reactor / Edition 1

by Judith Vollmer

Overview

Reactor gives voice to beloved and ruined American landscapes through extended meditations of an urban mystical wanderer.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780299199449
Publisher:	University of Wisconsin Press
Publication date:	04/12/2004
Series:	Wisconsin Poetry Series
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	88
Product dimensions:	6.50(w) x 10.00(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Judith Vollmer is professor of English and director of the writing program at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg. She is the author of three other poetry collections including The Door is Open to the Fire and Level Green, the 1990 winner of the Brittingham Poetry Prize.

Table of Contents

	Acknowledgments	ix
	The Coffee Line	xi
I
	Yucca Mountain Sequence	3
i.	The Reactor	3
ii.	Sedan Crater, 1962-	5
iii.	U1A Tunnel: Persephone's Story	7
iv.	General Brenda Gives a Press Conference	9
v.	Note & Xeroxed Letter Left in Grotto #8, Yucca Mountain, October 2001	12
vi.	Abandoned Camp near Paiute Mesa	14
II
	Note to the Mist	17
	Early Snow	19
	Spoil Islands	20
	Coffee with Narrative	21
	On Reading a Fragment from Nuclear Safety Commission Files Explaining the Events of June 30, 1918	25
	Valery Larbaud (1881-1957): Images (an imitation)	26
	Stephane Mallarme (an imitation) Lying under an Arbor While Dreaming of the Sea	28
	Happy Hour at the Pantheon	29
III
	Persephone Returning	33
	The Dead Lucia	35
	The Moon Replied	37
	After Reading the Verses of a Great American Poet	39
	The Orange Sea	40
	Bruche in Her Summer Kitchen	41
	Installation	42
	The Legions of Caesar	43
	House Spiders	44
	To de Beauvoir after Reading One of Several Fashionable Pathobiographies	45
	She Kept Me	46
	Breakfast without Sweets	48
	July Evening with Ancestors	50
IV
	Port of Entry	53
	Extended Family Genealogy	54
	Spill	56
	In Praise of Camus at the End of His Century	57
	Listening to Birds after a Mild Winter	60
	The Eavesdropper	61
	Five Wedding Songs	63
	The Ice Fall	66

Editorial Reviews

"Read Reactor and let Vollmer refresh your geography in startling ways."—Robin Becke

"If Literature is ‘a study in comparative humanity,’ and I think it is, Reactor places new emphasis on our complicitous age of nuclear fission at all levels of conscientiousness, in the strategies of high brow expatriots, and Vollmer’s identification with the ‘lowest of the low’ wayfaring strangers, a high-wire act among her pantheon of peasant witnesses. This archeology of tonalities, sometimes evinced with compelling lines from her literary ancestors, connects the fierce remembrance of ‘family,’ hers and ours. We have a new vocabulary of songmaking, ancient and modern."—Michael S. Harper, poet laureate emeritus, State of Rhode Island

From the Publisher