A book of poems about identity, annihilation, and what survives it.

ATOMIC I begins with an atomic blast and spirals outward into an investigation of the lyric “I” where point of view is examined, obliterated, and returned to. Traversing twenty-nine nuclear tests and the landscapes themselves as sites of obliteration and return, Dior Stephens inhabits the perspective of the soldiers and civilian observers who witnessed these experiments in chopped and dispersed lyric sequences that enact memory as flash and sensation. Drawing on the Bhagavad Gita and Count Basie’s orchestra as counterforces, Stephens locates a jazz cosmology running underneath the blasts.