“Each poem Sara Sams writes is a reckoning with man-made devastation. In her brilliant debut collection, Atom City, she proves herself to be a poet of immense personal and historical depth as she investigates complicity in one of history’s most frightening discoveries: the atomic bomb. The result is a haunting and intimate conversation about language and truth.”
–Diana Marie Delgado
I didn't know the secret
we kept when I lived in the town
where quiet vines thread trees in winter.
The hard coin whirs
against my tongue:
I don't believe I've ever been quiet
just because I was told.
more praise for Atom City
“Atom City opens with a caution, ‘But Think, Are You Authorized to Tell It.’ In poems of sharp wit and riveting investigation, tell it she does! Aware of the irony of ‘grow[ing] up happy/ in a town that knitted/ mushroom clouds,’ Sams documents government duplicity and the revisionist history of developing the atomic bomb. The volume is punctuated by poems rich in details of her Appalachian roots and a magnificent series about local legend “Prophet John,” who foresaw the bomb a century ago. This is a bold debut by a major new poet.”
– Cynthia Hogue, author of In June, the Labyrinth
“Sara Sams’ Atom City shows us what violence and invisible interiority and tenderness is at the core of the American hometown. At the core of the American superpower myth. At the core of American exceptionalism, and uranium, and the atom, itself– which is at the core of everything. When hometown is intertwined with the mushroom cloud, when childhood is entangled with the physicist, Sams teaches us that you can ‘feel your fibers loosen, too– then fall,/ after standing years, involuntarily, on end.’ I will never think of the bomb, or America, the same way again, after reading this.”
– Sarah Vap, author of Viability
Sara Sams 