Expansive poems connect personal, national, and global histories
In her wide-ranging third book, poet Kathleen Flenniken undertakes the difficult task of re-seeing what is before us. Post Romantic fuses personal memory with national and ecological upheaval, interweaving narratives of family, nuclear history, love of country, and a dangerous age moving too fast. Flenniken takes these challenging moments?bits and pieces of childhood, marriage, cultural touchstones?and holds them up to the light, seeking comfort in a complicated world that is at once heartbreaking, confounding, and dear.

Kathleen Flenniken won the Washington State Book Award for her poetry collection Plume. Her first book, Famous, won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and was named a Notable Book by the American Library Association. Flenniken's other awards include a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Artist Trust. She served as Washington State Poet Laureate from 2012 to 2014.