Episode 19: The Bomb Cloud

Our guest this episode is Tyler Mills, an instructor at Sarah Lawrence College’s Writing Institute and an award-winning poet whose work has appeared in – among many other publications – The New Yorker, The Guardian, and The Kenyon Review. She joins us to discuss her new mixed-media memoir, The Bomb Cloud, published in 2024 by Unbound Editions Press. The book takes its title from an “unauthorized” photograph of the mushroom cloud spreading over Nagasaki after it was bombed in World War II, a photo Tyler found in an album belonging to her late grandfather, who served as a pilot during the war and who claimed to have been secretly involved with the mission to drop the bomb.

Our interview covers a range of topics, including: how Tyler came to spend several years living and working in New Mexico, near the sites that constitute ground zero for the Atomic Age; the challenges of researching in an archive defined by secrecy and erasure; the ekphrastic nature of The Bomb Cloud, and Tyler’s technique of collaging photos from the Trinity nuclear-test explosion to capture the violent “gaze of the perceiver who witnesses an act of harm and knowingly keeps those nearby away from this knowledge.”

We also chat about how authoring this book changed Tyler’s perception of what she can do as a writer; the differences between the “I” of lyric poetry and the “I” of memoir; the role of literary form and aesthetic beauty in the nuclear era; and how people living in “atomic communities” like Los Alamos – or like Amarillo, TX, located 20 miles from the nation’s largest nuclear disassembly plant – can come to terms with the possibility of disaster and violence “so terrible, so deeply imprinted into our collective consciousness that we don’t want to see it.”

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To read some of Tyler’s poetry and essays – and to sign up for her monthly poetry prompt – you can visit her website, tylermills.com. You can also read some of her work at poetryfoundation.org.