In Nuclear Impact: Broken Atoms in Our Hands is the symphonic voices of 163 poets living throughout the United States and world, in places such as India, Britain, Ireland, Canada, Philippines, Japan, South Africa, Guam, Singapore, Poland, Australia, France, Vietnam, Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, Germany, China and Pakistan, on the impact of nuclear power and warfare on human life and the planet. Navajo poet Hershman R. John’s poem, “Theory of Light,” opens the anthology. Towards the end of Hershman’s beautiful and heart-breaking poem, he writes “The sun’s core/is made from turquoise and the moon’s mass is made from radiant white shell/lighting the metallic half-life in susurrations across/the Navajo-Hopi reservations.” The poems in the anthology take us through Navajo-Hopi reservations, the Nevada desert, Los Alamos, Hiroshima & Nagasaki, Three Mile Island, Trinity, air raid drills, Chernobyl, Pripyat, Ogoturuk Valley, Alaska, Fukushima, nuclear testing in India and Pakistan, and more. In the poems, we experience the legacy of nuclear power created by human hands and its effects on human life and all life on Mother Earth. In the second to the last poem in the anthology, Vivian Faith Prescott, a fifth generation Alaskan of Sámi heritage, reveals nuclear impact in the tundra, the Chuckchi Sea and villages, in her brilliant and chilling poems, “Project Chariot” and “Recipe for Disaster at Ogotoruk Valley.” Through the words and clarity of these poets, we see the reach of nuclear impact from the desert to the far reaches of the Artic.
