Abstract

The Manhattan Project is a book of lyric poetry that chronicles the discovery of nuclear energy and its subsequent use as both a weapon and a fuel source. The book is grounded in the aesthetic positionality contained in scholar Joyelle McSweeney’s concept of the ‘necropastoral’, a liminal zone where disparate spaces, such as the classical `urban` and `pastoral`, become blurred. The Manhattan Project examines the enduring impossibility of sufficiently responding to the continuing repercussions of the nuclear age and its post-nuclear contaminants through a kind of `resurrection` of lyric meditation, further mutated by both formal constraints and conceptual frameworks.