The Robot Scientist's Daughter

I am incredibly grateful for this book and to learn of this poet/author. I initially found this book because I love science fiction and Masaaki Sasamoto illustrations. The title and cover made me purchase it immediately. I honestly had no idea that the author or material had anything to do with Oak Ridge. As a native of Knoxville, Tennessee whose grandfather died from cancer at age 42 after working for ORNL during the 1940s-1962, I was stunned to find how close to home this subject hit me. My father was just a teen when his father died. His mother was grief stricken and institutionalized at Eastern State Hospital, and Oak Ridge offered my father a job as compensation, mowing the grass. After a ton of health problems plaguing our family, we were granted a settlement 40 years after my grandfather’s death, which helped to pay for my college and I am now a librarian who loves science fiction. I related with the poems through feelings of my own and my father’s. The universe is a funny place. This book was never advertised to me in any way. Had I not loved Yoshitaka Amano and through him browsed Masaaki Sasamoto, I would have never found this gem. I’m so grateful.

The Robot Scientist’s Daughter presents the harrowing truth of growing up in the town of Oakridge, TN, aka The Atomic City and the Secret City, home of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a pilot plant for the production of plutonium. The speaker shares eye-opening details of growing up in what appears on the surface to be a typical small American town, where sunbeams and fossilized snails share a backyard rife with radioactive dirt, a town where “they lit cesium to measure the glow,” where everything is “unstable, unstable, dancing away, ticking away in bones, fingernails, brain.” In “The Women of America’s Secret City in 1945,” we learn that lab employees, including the speaker’s father, have “been warned / by a billboard on the way to work: / ‘What you see here … stays here.’ In the same poem Gailey sums up in one stunning simile the friendly female employees who were “contained / like the particles under the K-25 and Y-12.” The warning becomes increasingly menacing as we learn in poems such as “The Taste of Rust in August,” that the speaker has iron-poor blood and her skin is wan. Could this be because “she knows the click of the Geiger counter / better than her own heart,” because “what they sowed in the ground isn’t gone”? Signs point to a resounding yes. As the book progresses, we learn along with the speaker that not only lilies and foxgloves naturally deadly, but seemingly benign objects, including snowmen, are “hot” (“Lessons in Poison”). Gailey’s collection contains several poems with the same title: “The Robot Scientist’s Daughter,” but each one is followed by a descriptor in brackets ([Before], [in films, [sign of hope], etc. In “The Robot Scientist’s Daughter [medical wonder],” the speaker imagines herself an impenetrable robot, “silver and shiny and smooth … a soldier, / a savior.” In my very favorite of this group of imagined scenarios of the speaker’s powers, “The Robot Scientist’s Daughter [Polonium-210], the speaker has morphed to a “tightly-controlled molecule,” teetering “at the edge of decay, a half-life of skin and soul.” Throughout this fascinating collection, we learn, through Gailey’s exacting eye, that the disconnect between what’s really going on and what seems to be going on is gargantuan. In one of the most tragically poignant poems, “Chaos Theory,” a janitor’s garden is reveled at for its “dahlias and tomatoes / doubling and tripling in sizeand variety, magentas, pinks and reds so bright / they blinded,” when in fact the father knows but cannot “translate / for him the meaning of all this unnatural beauty.” The poem ends with the tragic detail that“When my father brought this story home, / he never mentioned the janitor’s slow death from radiation / poisoning, only those roses, those tomatoes.” The Robot Scientist’s Daughter is a stern reminder that while nuclear power is arguably a ‘clean’’ source of energy compared to coal, an often unspoken truth is that radiation can sicken, debilitate, and kill people. In “She Explains Her Fear of Bees,” we learn that what the speaker thought were bees are actually wasps, a dead-ringer metaphor for the seemingly benevolent overseers of The Manhattan Project: Yellow jackets don’tlose their stinger, like honeybees. They keep stinging. They are reallywasps, not bees at all, little liars. Why do they hide underground?To teach us dangers unseen …These ‘dangers unseen’ fuel Gailey’s latest collection, a necessary window into the dangers inherent in nuclear power and weapons production.

The Robot Scientist’s Daughterrobot by Jeannine Hall Gailey is a collection of poems that are quite powerful. While my initial attraction to the collection was the title and beautiful book cover, it soon became apparent that these poems run so much deeper than that. The collection reflects on the author’s own childhood growing up near the Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee where nuclear experiments were conducted and the effects that this had on her growing up and years later on her health as an adult.The poems are so full of imagery and I thought sadness. Sadness in growing up as a kid and not knowing that doing something as simple as chewing on a blade of grass or tasting snow could be so bad for you. As you read her words you can almost feel the radiation and sickness closing in on you; the unfairness of it all. Yet there is hope in the the water lilies that bloom and the sunflowers that are planted and in just being a kid. It was interesting to see both sides of the coin – the goodness and beauty in the world around you and yet the devastation in how easily it can all crumble.As always I am no expert when it comes to poetry but I enjoyed this collection and hope to read more from this author. The poems reflect real life mixed with science fiction mixed with the devastating effects of the nuclear world. These poems continue to haunt me and I don’t think I’ll soon forget them. I’ll leave you with a piece I found particularly powerful… not to mention the author’s poetry shows her amazing talent much better than I could ever put into words.The Robot Scientist’s Daughter (recumbent)She lies back on a floor of pine needles looking up at a skyobscured by crooked branches. But she can’t be back-this must be a memory, tricking her, her hands on the dampviolets and moss, the sharp shells of acorns a mirage.If she could, she would once again be part of this wood,her own cells the building blocks of the next flower,the next kit fox. Trace elements still exist inside herthat call her to this place, the skeleton of decayed leavesa reminder that her own skeleton, marrow emptied out,might emit the same markers, might showthe exact same chemical makeup. When she was youngthere were so many daffodils, she could not pick them all-she ran her hands along their frilled faces, she placedher face in their clusters and smiled, covered in yellowpollen. Even the glue of their stems on her hands smelledlike sunshine. One more trick. She lies back,and remembers perennials that no longer exist.She will not die here in concrete. Her body belongs there,in a flower-field tilled under, waiting, vast and empty,for her to return.