Poetry, Spring 2010

A recently completed cover design for Michael Lista's Bloom due for release in April 2010.

In May of 1946, on the day of a lunar eclipse, a Canadian physicist named Louis Slotin was in his last hours of work training his replacement on the Manhattan Project. Slotin’s job was to bring a core of nuclear fissile material as close to criticality as possible. This process is known as "tickling the dragon's tail."

The title Bloom refers to an event in which plutonium goes critical, in this case caused by Slotin's error, the slip of the screwdriver.

In his new work of poetry, Bloom, Michael Lista reimagines this fateful day.