“Plane” is a good poetry word. It is multi-valanced, widely homonymous, and deceptively simple. In a pinch, it can signify a person, a place, or a thing; a surface, a space, or a tool; a dimension, an expanse, or a machine. Tyler Mills’ Hawk Parable, which won the 2017 Akron Poetry Prize (University of Akron Press, 2019), contains planes of all kinds, among them the great plains of the American west and southwest; the plane of the plain, white page; and the airplane her grandfather flew in World War II, possibly involved in the Nagasaki mission. Hawk Parable grapples with a family mystery and a personal testimony from within its gyre. Its language is that which families use with each other: plain-spoken, storied, idiomatic, and deeply private. But Mills’ diction is also fevered with terror, one of a person who is both drawn to and suspicious of atavism—the spirits that reach us by way of our ancestors, whether we like it or not.

In one of the book’s first poems, “Negative Peeled from a Cardboard Album,” Mills squints at an old family photograph: “Outside, / the planes tick with heat. There is a snake / bleeding out the mouth. / No. A hose leaks water.” Throughout the book, Mills examines lineage, trying to untangle fact from fable: to what extent did her grandfather take part in the slaughter of 35,000 people? A different poet might stop there, in the foggy outskirts of the whole story, content with only the peripheral. But with the fervency of a historian, Mills looks boldly into the eye of the untellable, even when her eye plays tricks on her: “My great-grandfather designed the stealth-bomber,” she writes in a poem called “Oxygen Mask.” “One of its skeleton blueprints / hung on the wall in our sun-room. / The frame caught our faces / if we stood with our eyes close enough to the razor-blade / wings.”

Perhaps no other image better characterizes Hawk Parable than this one does. As in “Negative Peeled…”, Mills’ gaze revises itself. She cannot reconcile with her grandfather’s shadows or her own, but she tries, and her poems follow in contrails. “The clouds will be anvils, or veils, or hair,” she posits in “Cloud Cover,” riding the thin line between the real and the imagined “like a wheel riding over a rope.” No metaphor is trustworthy in Hawk Parable, and perhaps no metaphor is more unreliable than the hawk itself. At their most symbolic, Mills’ hawks evoke aviation—the shiny, paneled fuselages of B-17s and B-29s—and at their most mythic, they appear as messengers: in hexes, mirages, reflections on the water. “Are you real?” she asks in her poem, “On the Hawk that Crossed My Path in a Dystopian Landscape.” “You arrive like an answer to a question I didn’t ask.”

But Mills’ hawks, when they are at their best, are just hawks, with “Jerusalem cricket shells in [their] pellets,” as are the many other flora and fauna that poppy the book. Across her poems, Mills evokes New Mexico’s eerie, arid ecosystems, telescoping from the massive spans of Rothko-like plateaus, down to the “the glassed wing of a fly.” She stations her reader in “the blood center of a hibiscus,” where “the stratosphere has been soaped ginger and tangerine,” and “the pink land covers it all like an infection.” There are eco-poetics at play here—portrayals of the vast effects that industry, waste, and radiation have on the environment—but Mills never succumbs to didacticism, or to the usual field marks of the post-apocalypse. There are no gas masks in Hawk Parable, none of the sexed-up desert roses and combat boots that are indulged by other heroes of eco-narratives. Rather, the apocalypse in Mills’ poems is personal, hereditary, and unphotogenic. It does not lend itself to a heroic ending.

Hawk Parable, in many ways, teeters in the direction of nonfiction, a lyrical retelling of a family history, scavenged and assembled from personal and historical sources: National Geographic articles from the 1950s, Mills’ grandfather’s diaries from his deployment, declassified U.S. nuclear test films she found on YouTube, etc. One section of the book, a long poem titled “Exposure,” makes particularly rich use of source material. A series of collaged poems, written in her own version of the erasure process, “Exposure” sources accounts from survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, whose names appear in the book’s notes section. “Exposure” is sparse but ambitious, offering readers shrapnel-sharp monologues that recall post-bombing Japan and its scattered population. “The doctors had forbidden the patients / water,” one vignette reads. “I poured it from the spout / of a kettle / into the open mouths.” Certainly, Mills’ intention was to particularize these victims, who are all too often referred to only en masse. Each section is a hot ember on the tongue and offers another dimension to Hawk Parable, widening the book’s purview beyond Mills herself.

“Exposure” is just one of many of Mills’ projects that many poets would deem taboo or simply too ambitious. (Another is a vibrant abecedarian that employs the words “umbra” and “quills” and “x-marks” in quick succession with absolute grace). To use victim testimonies as material for art—especially testimonies from people who have suffered trauma at the hands of her blood relative—is no simple task. But Mills is not a stranger to interrogating her privilege. Privilege is at the hypocenter of this book. In a poem titled “Reaction,” which is set at the resting site of Chicago Pile-1, she writes, “I crossed over the buried / reactor without thought, trying to learn / enough French to pass the language / of time, I remember some Sartre.” Mills knows that she writes from a place of advantage, that her race and nationality separate her from the reality of her content. She is aware that she treads within the protected, aboveground world of academia—of a generation and country relatively untouched by atomic warfare—but her willingness to investigate the mirage of safety gives the poems a productive tension, and this tension gives her book its talons.

“How should I / unstring these / clouds? Easy / now. Easy,” she coos in “The Atomic Bomb of Operation Crossroads Speaks,” imagining the persona of the bomb itself. But there is nothing easy in Hawk Parable. It is not a parable at all. Any moral lesson that rises to the surface of this book fails. It short-circuits when faced with the enormous complexity of itself. Mills does not discover the truth about her grandfather. Of course she doesn’t, because the truth has crystalized and fractured under the weight of children and years. But her efforts—her torrid, surprising journey into catacombs of the past—succeed in a way that no resolution ever could. In the face of boundless mystery, fraught histories, and uncertain futures, Mills offers her readers a glimpse of the absolute present: “What I thought was a tinderbox is actually / a box of bullets,” she writes in “The Sun Rising, Pacific Theatre.” “What you thought was the sun is the sun.”