The Manhattan Project

Ken Hunt

• Publisher: University of Calgary Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781773850542
• eBook ISBN: 9781773850566
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: Literature

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.

the arms race

below oklo

Press your ear against this fossilized nautilus

to hear the hum of a natural reactor.

Below and before the colonial mines, before

the bombs, the fallout, and the shelters,

there was a buried decanter of light, a lair

of drakaina, a chasm where a granular fuzz

of uranium crystals tickled the feet of eyeless

naiads, their silver skin dipped in a balm

of stray ions. These nymphs bathed

in superheated cisterns of trapped water.

They fed on plumes of heat produced

by buried suns, whose pungent rays pickled

the tissues of the earth. They drank

the dew of Styx from crystal goblets.

Ancient reactor coolant pacified

the shrieks of stillborn stars, whose songs cut

through the earth with wild notes, each burst

of fission sizzling like a sunken lantern

plunging into the maw of an subsea trench.

The naiads’ infernal sauna predates us;

this Pandora’s box unlocked itself. Before

our earliest ancestors first tread through

southern savannahs, a restless trove

of nuclear fuel pulsed in this georeactor,

each Precambrian throb a spasm of ore,

a radionuclear twitch eager to spill forth.

Neodymium dissolves in this aching heat.

Ruthenium unravels in this raving deep,

decay particles caught in sandstone,

clay, and granite. Thermal neutrons

sunder the surrounding umber stone

of these hothouse catacombs.

Carcinogenic steam from hellish

bathhouses permeates troughs

of liquid heat, where even molecules boil,

where even nuclei evaporate.

In the naiads’ company, a necromancer

charms the cavern’s dead back to life.

Calcified skeletons crack open their

stratified tombs to dance

in the antechamber of Earth’s

first critical mass.

Nature was never innocent, trapping hymns

within black crystals, testing her flesh

in water-woven trenches, breeding grounds

for her tectonic fauna: uraninite, pitchblende,

thorianite, pegmatite, betafite, lost volumes

from a mineralogical apocrypha.

The demise of our species

is written in these stones.

There was a revelation when the mines opened,

though the miracle was merely material.

Plunderers dove into the earth

for the spoils of energy. And human life

prepared itself for omnicide,

bathing in the waters of its doom.

radioactivity

for Marie Skłodowska Curie

Relentless curiosity compelled you to plunge

your hands into elemental embodiments

of chaotic decay, to tinker with glinting flasks

of vicious species of dust.

If young Joan of Arc spoke with god, and was burned

for their exchanges, then which gods communed with you

and set your bones ablaze, left you delirious

from necrotic marrow?

For how many hours, O bright priestess

of Prometheus, did you bear bundles

of test tubes, slid into the pockets

of your lab coats, each glass vial alight

with flameless fire, leaving your c...

Table of contents

• the atoms we cleave
• the arms race
• trinity
• ghosts of los alamos
• industrial complex
• military incidents
• rain of ruin
• contamination
• doomsday machines
• destroyers of worlds
• fallout