Reactor

Judith Vollmer is professor of English and director of the writing program at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg. She is the author of three other poetry collections including The Door is Open to the Fire and Level Green, the 1990 winner of the Brittingham Poetry Prize.

Read Reactor and let Vollmer refresh your geography in startling ways."—Robin Becker "If Literature is ‘a study in comparative humanity,’ and I think it is, Reactor places new emphasis on our complicitous age of nuclear fission at all levels of conscientiousness, in the strategies of high brow expatriots, and Vollmer’s identification with the ‘lowest of the low’ wayfaring strangers, a high-wire act among her pantheon of peasant witnesses. This archeology of tonalities, sometimes evinced with compelling lines from her literary ancestors, connects the fierce remembrance of ‘family,’ hers and ours. We have a new vocabulary of songmaking, ancient and modern."—Michael S. Harper, poet laureate emeritus, State of Rhode Island