Two Faint Lines In The Violet

In Two Faint Lines in the Violet, Kiernan explores poetry's unique ability to document yet revision the nuclear age, how when singing somewhere between the personal and political--if we listen closely--we might hear the social.

Fueled by her investigation into Yankee Rowe Nuclear Power Plant--the first large-scale nuclear unit and also the first shut down due to embrittlement concerns--the etiology of her father's brain tumor, and her experiences coming of age in New York City, she laments and fêtes the abundance of lessons learned, ultimately tuning in to "the electricity of life" (Amy King), where personal and industrial meltdowns converse and converge.

Confessionalism tempered by omission, experimentation in diction, and the restraint of set form are brushed into landscapes spanning the iconic to the deceptively bucolic--lush, yet toxic, watersheds to concrete jungles.