THE BOMB CLOUD

This dreamy, elliptical narrative loops fragments of evidence and observation to destabilize the history of the atomic bomb.

In this work, Mills, an American essayist, poet, teacher, and artist, probes emotions of the Cold War era that have often been ignored. Many people have only basic knowledge about the testing of the first atomic bombs and their deployment, but Mills enriches the story with a plethora of astonishing details, some of which come to light when she reconsiders her grandfather’s war stories. Was he part of the mission that laid waste to a Japanese city with nuclear bomb? After all, he possessed an unauthorized photo of the atomic bomb cloud spreading over Nagasaki. Answers don’t come easily, but Mills embraces ambiguity. She makes visible the people displaced by bomb testing, the people who still reside in Los Alamos, New Mexico, in proximity to hazardous nuclear waste decay, and communities like the Tularosa Basin Downwinders, who were not warned of early testing and were thus poisoned by radiation. She notes the erasures "of peoples, places, and facts that cloud the development of the atomic bomb. I make no claim to fill in the gaps. What I have done is to articulate the shape of the cloud that obscures them.” She has crafted a lyrical story that embraces feelings of terror, grief, and hope, including her own meditation on her attempts to conceive a child, and her subsequent role as a parent in a frightening world. The visual nature of explosions is also a frequent focus; Mills expresses her attraction and revulsion regarding them in a series of collages and paintings, which she reproduces and interprets in these pages. The abstract and challenging structure of the book is, for the most part, effective. However, some sections, such as a lengthy one concerning a dog in her neighborhood, are perhaps a bit too far from the memoir’s thematic center.

Repetition and reverie propel this unusual and often riveting memoir about the terror of atomic power.