The poems in Plume are nuclear-age songs of innocence and experience set in the "empty" desert West. Award-winning poet Kathleen Flenniken grew up in Richland, Washington, at the height of the Cold War, next door to the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, where "every father I knew disappeared to fuel the bomb," and worked at Hanford herself as a civil engineer and hydrologist. By the late 1980s, declassified documents revealed decades of environmental contamination and deception at the plutonium production facility, contradicting a lifetime of official assurances to workers and their families that their community was and always had been safe. At the same time, her childhood friend Carolyn's own father was dying of radiation-induced illness: "blood cells began to err one moment efficient the next / a few gone wrong stunned by exposure to radiation / as [he] milled uranium into slugs or swabbed down / train cars or reported to B Reactor for a quick run-in / run-out." Plume, written twenty years later, traces this American betrayal and explores the human capacity to hold truth at bay when it threatens one's fundamental identity. Flenniken observes her own resistance to facts: "one box contains my childhood / the other contains his death / if one is true / how can the other be true?" The book's personal story and its historical one converge with enriching interplay and wide technical variety, introducing characters that range from Carolyn and her father to Italian physicist Enrico Fermi and Manhattan Project health physicist Herbert Parker. As a child of "Atomic City," Kathleen Flenniken brings to this tragedy the knowing perspective of an insider coupled with the art of a precise, unflinching, gifted poet. Watch the book trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iSaR9mfeeM

Hitch a ride on the Albatross Express and travel the globe with Plume: World Explorer. This exciting new picture book series for little ones celebrates culture, diversity and the natural wonders of our world. Plume is not your typical Antarctic penguin. Sporting a bright yellow plume on the top of his head, Plume is bored of black and white, of shuffling around and snoozing on icebergs. He much prefers to cook, read, knit and sky dive. He craves colour, adventure, excitement! He wants to seize the world he’s discovered in the books of his fantastical, glacier library (the largest in the Southern Hemisphere). Plume's great hope is to grow the hearts and minds of his penguin friends. Through his travels, children will engage with themes such as friendship, acceptance, understanding and the wellbeing of our planet. Plume is truly a book series for our times.

New York Times selection for Best Illustrated Children's Books of 2017 In this lovely book, young readers are introduced to a variety of beautiful birds, from the familiar chicken to the exotic ibis. But lurking in the background of every page is a cat, who also seems very interested in the birds. With its funny illustrations and engaging concepts, this clever counting book will invite readers to linger over every page.

Exploring the fascinating stories of more than a dozen authorial impostors across several centuries and cultures, Carmela Ciuraru plumbs the creative process and the darker, often crippling aspects of fame. Only through the protective guise of Lewis Carroll could a shy, half-deaf Victorian mathematician at Oxford feel free to let his imagination run wild. The "three weird sisters" from Yorkshire—the BrontËs—produced instant bestsellers that transformed them into literary icons, yet they wrote under the cloak of male authorship. Bored by her aristocratic milieu, a cigar-smoking, cross-dressing baroness rejected the rules of propriety by having sexual liaisons with men and women alike, publishing novels and plays under the name George Sand. Highly accessible and engaging, these provocative stories reveal the complex motives of writers who harbored secret identities—sometimes playfully, sometimes with terrible anguish and tragic consequences. Part detective story, part exposÉ, part literary history, Nom de Plume is an absorbing psychological meditation on identity and creativity.

A bilingual edition of the most famous of Henri Michaux's poetry collections, now in a new translation from the French. The figure of Plume preoccupied the great Belgian poet Henri Michaux throughout his career. Plume, meaning feather or pen, is a character who drifts from one thing to another, losing shape, taking new forms, at perpetual risk from reality. He is a personification of the imagination as subject to innumerable pratfalls and disgraces, and yet indestructible for all that. In this new bilingual edition, with translations by Richard Sieburth, the entire Plume cycle appears for the first time in English in the form in which Michaux originally published it.

Symbol of power, strength, and freedom, the American bald eagle appears on coins, dollar bills, postage stamps, identification cards, and the presidential seal. It is seen everywhere except in the sky, although that is changing; nearly extinct in 1970, the bald eagle has made a modest comeback. In Eagle’s Plume, Bruce E. Beans recounts the compelling, centuries-old story of the bald eagle’s place in American culture and landscape an its struggle for survival. Reviled by western stockmen as a killer of lambs and calves, the bald eagle has been deified by environmentalists as a reminder of America’s natural heritage. When the great national bird was robbed of its habitat and poisoned with pesticides, federal and environmental groups and local communities rallied to save it. Their heroic efforts are chronicled in the book, which also takes the measure and pulse of the bird that so impressed ancient storytellers.

From Yiddish-speaking Russian-Lithuanian feather handlers in South Africa to London manufacturers and wholesalers, from New York's Lower East Side to entrepreneurial farms in the American West, this text explores the details of a remarkably vibrant yet ephemeral culture.