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Desert Fathers, Uranium Daughters book cover
Desert Fathers, Uranium Daughters
1996
First Published
3.68
Average Rating
98
Number of Pages
Award-winning poet Debora Greger grew up in Washington near the site of the Hanford atomic plant, which, unbeknownst to its workers, manufactured plutonium for the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. “The high school team was named the Bombers,” she writes. “The school ring had a mushroom cloud on it.” In Desert Fathers, Uranium Daughters she uses what The Nation has characterized as her “deadpan wit, intelligence and marvelous insight” to explore the legacy of a Catholic girlhood spent in a landscape where “even the dust, though we didn’t know it then, was radioactive.” “Call us out of the animal,” Greger writes, invoking the ghost of a poet conjured in “Nights of 1995,” in what could be construed as the motto of a collection filled with what Poetry called “priceless instants where the mundane flares up into the miraculous.”
Avg Rating
3.68
Number of Ratings
40
5 STARS
23%
4 STARS
38%
3 STARS
28%
2 STARS
10%
1 STARS
3%
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Author

Debora Greger
Debora Greger
Author · 8 books

Debora Greger (b. 1949) is an American poet and visual artist. Greger was raised in Richland, Washington. She attended the University of Washington and then the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Greger then went on to hold fellowships at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and at Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She was professor of English and creative writing at the University of Florida until retiring. Greger now works as Poet-in-Residence at the Harn Museum of Art. Greger has published numerous books of poetry, including Men, Women, and Ghosts (2008), and her work has been included in issues of Best American Poetry . As a reviewer for Publishers Weekly observed, Greger “rarely rejoices, though she can surely console; her pruned-back, autumnal sensibility and her balanced lines suit the scenes she portrays.” Her poetry has been included in six volumes of The Best American Poetry and she has exhibited her artwork at several galleries and museums across the country. She also has a poem on Poetry 180 in number 42. Her work appeared in Paris Review, The Nation, Poetry, and The New Criterion. Debora Greger lives in Gainesville, Florida and Cambridge, England with her life-partner, the poet and critic, William Logan.

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