Juliana Spahr’s latest poetry collection “Ars Poeticas” opens looking backward from a great height:
To write poetry after Castle Bravo. Then to write poetry after 1,500 feet. After high-quality steel frame buildings, not completely collapsed, except all panels and roofs blown in.
In 1954, the United States, having already detonated atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki less than a decade earlier, tested its largest thermonuclear weapon in the Pacific Proving Grounds. A treaty with more than 100 signatories halted the practice in 1963, largely due to the environmental devastation wrought by Castle Bravo — the most powerful nuclear device to be detonated by the U.S.
