The Stranger

Here’s why you should care that Kathleen Flenniken is Washington State’s newest poet laureate: She’s an actually good poet. Her latest book, Plume, is a collection of poems that build into a narrative about the Hanford nuclear site, and it’s a bleak, personal account of a local disaster that’s unfolding in slow motion. Flenniken could be talking about radioactive waste when she warns of “our mistakes/which are brutish/which will linger ten thousand years/which may end us altogether,” or she could be talking about heartbreak. But probably she’s talking about both. (Elliott Bay Book Company, 1521 10th Ave, www.elliottbaybook.com, 7 pm, free) by Paul Constant

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