The Fourth of July, a review of She Returns to the Floating World, a Poem for Japan and some Recipes

Happy Fourth of July, Everyone!

Thanks to Sandy Longhorn for her beautiful review of She Returns to the Floating World:
http://sandylonghorn.blogspot.com/2011/07/what-im-reading-she-returns-to-floating.html

For some delicious red, white, and blue recipes, go check out my blueberry ricotta gelato and grilled watermelon salad recipes at my gluten free blog here:
http://glutenfreenorthwestadventures.blogspot.com/

On a somewhat more sobering note, I read the disturbing news that Cesium-137 traces have entered the water supply of Tokyo, Japan, as a result of the nuclear power plant disasters out there. This poem, “Cesium Burns Blue,” describes the contamination of my childhood home, Oak Ridge, with this same isotope. It was first published in The Cincinnati Review Winter 2010 issue.

Cesium Burns Blue[1]

Copper burns green. Sodium yellow,
strontium red. Watch the flaming lights
that blaze across your skies, America –
there are burning satellites
even now being swallowed by your horizon,
the detritus of space programs long defunct,
the hollowed masterpieces of dead scientists.

Someone is lying on a grassy hill,
counting shooting stars,
wondering what happens
when they hit the ground.

In my back yard, they lit cesium
to measure the glow.
Hold it in your hand:
foxfire, wormwood, glow worm.

Cesium lights the rain,
absorbed in the skin,
unstable, unstable
dancing away, ticking away
in bones, fingernails, brain.
Sick burns through, burns blue.

[1] Cesium burns with a blue light, explodes on contact with water, and has a highly radioactive isotope which was used in experiments at Oak Ridge. It can cause mental instability or other problems if absorbed through the skin or ingested; children ingesting produce grown in contaminated soil might exhibit mental symptoms as well as physical symptoms later in life.

You can see me reading the poem last year in San Francisco at a Fourteen Hills reading, here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NolDPaTkZDk

My husband Glenn (a chemical engineer) wants me to remind you that our blue fireworks use less dangerous copper salts, which can burn blue or green, not Cesium.

Japan, nuclear disaster, donations, and Marie Howe

At March 16, 2011
By Jeannine Gailey
In Cesium Burns Blue, donations, fallout, Japan disaster, kitsune books, Marie Howe
4

I’m sorry to say that the situation in Japan has not gotten better in the last few days. I spent the last couple of years researching the effects of radioactive contamination in my childhood hometown of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, for my third MS, “The Robot Scientist’s Daughter.” The kinds of things – cesium in the body, radioactivity in the food chain – deer, wasps, swallows, increased risks of thyroid cancer and leukemia – that I found make me even more dismayed when I read about the problems with the nuclear reactors in Japan. Exposed rods = very bad. Cesium leaked into the environment now will probably still be there in thirty years. It accumulates in the human body and builds up over time, like many nuclear contaminants like Strontium-90.

I’m going to donate all proceeds from my first book, Becoming the Villainess, sold in the next week or two, to Doctors Without Borders, so if you’d like to order, click here.

I’m trying to write a new dedication for my second book with Kitsune Books, She Returns to the Floating World, to honor the victims and survivors of the terrible events of the last week. I believe Kitsune Books is going to look for a way to donate a portion of the profits to Japanese earthquake disaster charities as well. All my words seem so pitiful and weak in the face of so much devastation and loss. Nothing seems adequate.

Last night I went to see Marie Howe, one of my favorite poets, read in downtown Seattle. I was happy to see some of my poetry friends, and listen to such a wonderful warm poet read her work, which was spunky and funny and direct. Howe’s What the Living Do, about her life in the wake of her brother’s death from AIDS, is a book I’ve read over and over. It embraces the pain, the every-dayness, of surviving. In the end, poetry is something we create as an after-effect of surviving, as a testament to humanity’s ability to observe and survive and create in words some evidence of this.

Here’s a poem about Cesium, one of the nuclear products being released into Japan’s ecosystem as we speak, from Cincinnati Review’s Winter 2010 issue.

Cesium Burns Blue

In my back yard, they lit cesium
to measure the glow.
Hold it in your hand:
foxfire, wormwood, glow worm.
Cesium lights the rain,
absorbed in the skin,
unstable, unstable
dancing away, ticking away
in bones, fingernails, brain.
Sick burns through, burns blue.