Kathleen Flenniken Books

Kathleen Flenniken discovered poetry later in life, after a career as a civil engineer and hydrologist. Her collections delve into the fabric of daily domestic life, family history, and the complex past of her childhood home, including its nuclear legacy. She possesses a distinctive voice that explores themes of identity, memory, and the intricate relationship between personal experience and historical events. Flenniken excels at elevating the ordinary into the realm of the urgent, transforming readers into the central figures of their own unfolding narratives.

Post Romantic
104 pages
4 hours of reading
4.3(11)Add rating
In her wide-ranging third book, poet Kathleen Flenniken undertakes the difficult task of re-seeing what is before us. Post Romantic fuses personal memory with national and ecological upheaval, interweaving narratives of family, nuclear history, love of country, and a dangerous age moving too fast. Flenniken takes these challenging moments―bits and pieces of childhood, marriage, cultural touchstones―and holds them up to the light, seeking comfort in a complicated world that is at once heartbreaking, confounding, and dear.
Plume
Poems
80 pages
3 hours of reading
Set against the backdrop of the Cold War, the poems explore the profound impact of living near the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Richland, Washington. Kathleen Flenniken reflects on her childhood experiences and the environmental devastation revealed decades later, juxtaposing personal loss with collective denial. The work grapples with themes of betrayal, identity, and the struggle to reconcile painful truths, as Flenniken confronts her own memories and the legacy of radiation exposure that affected her community and her friend’s family.

Post Romantic

Plume