Praise for Intimacies, Received:
“Bambrick is vivid and meticulous. The poems in this collection are set mainly in southern Spain—the poet's memory of an assault in high school colliding with immediate details of the countryside, intimate gatherings, and sex as she travels through Spain years later. As she writes of new lovers, stories from her past emerge simultaneously as a way of framing her new reality for readers. This dance—back and forth—is a subtle but clear way of showing how difficult it is to unfurl from the past and build a new future. . . . In this way, Bambrick masterfully portrays how moments of intimacy can represent moments of violence—and how difficult it can be to untangle the two from each other. . . . Still, Bambrick refuses to let it define her life entirely. At every moment where the past infiltrates, the poet strikes back with the determination to own her present.”—NPR
“In this visceral and tender outing, Bambrick explores the relationship between trauma, intimacy, and memory. Mostly set in Southern Spain, these poems are grounded in the reality of the image. Characters drink ‘raisin wine,’ a horse is ‘tied to an old bridge,’ there are ‘coins smaller than pennies,’ and someone throws ‘two jump ropes over an olive tree.’ These details place the reader in a fragrant setting while Bambrick navigates the difficulty and pain of discovering the self: ‘I wonder what I should be.’ In another poem, she wonders how long she has thought that ‘the most important place/ was the place where somebody wanted me.’ Bambrick’s poems are lyric tightropes, walking the thin line between the real and the imaginary, and highlighting how trauma lives in a fragile present. They are equally brave in their honest exploration of sexuality and their frank admission of the struggle of such an exploration. ‘Every day,’ she writes, ‘I feel further from/ an idea of queerness.’ This collection glitters like stained glass, offering an intimate portrait of someone trying to live mindfully.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review
"Gorgeous imagery and careful diction, treading the lines between giving too much away and keeping too much hidden. Bambrick takes readers into a world where she grieves, crumbles, learns, grows, and ultimately triumphs. The storytelling and the abstract use of animals and the natural world as symbols pulls you in, as she speaks of sexuality, trauma, queerness, love, illness, and acceptance. . . . Bambrick’s book is a visceral, emotional triumph, encapsulating the feelings of all who have been through something that changed their body and being."—Intima
"Intimacies, Received is sharp and breathtaking, a collection that glints like a gathering of knives. Bambrick’s unsparing voice runs like a dangerous current throughout the poems, a reminder of the violence lurking within the landscape of the ordinary. Moving between the vivid landscapes of past and present and through the fractured intimacies of human connection, the collection seizes the stigma associated with hidden trauma and at long last holds it to light."—Adroit
“Bambrick’s poems make me feel incredibly shy and brave at the same time. I say make me because I can’t look away from them. The poems are telling me to sit down and listen.”—Su Cho, Poetry Foundation
"It is in the writing where the meaning is for Bambrick and where the purpose is in being a part of the world. The intimacy of Intimacies, Received is getting close to the earth, the searing sun of rural Spain, or the skin—and not looking away. But we must not confuse closeness with catharsis or certainty. Rather, Bambrick returns to the liminal spaces of indeterminacy or contradiction, where violence can be named or identified at the individual or structural level, but where emotional burrs still snag us in an intricate web of contradictory registers."—Brink
"Intimacies, Received experiments with an array of forms—an untitled, 13-part and numbered sequence that is spread out consecutively from the first poem to the last, stichic poems, poems in couplets, tercets, prose poems, a lyric essay. There are ekphrastic poems, persona pieces. It is as though—perhaps like the experience and memory of rape itself, or in the fragmented kinesis of the two Picasso pieces explored in this collection, The Rape and Head of a Woman—the terrain that the book’s protagonist must traverse can only be understood through an array of approaches and an accumulation, a layering of myriad parts."—Lisa Russ Spaar, Adroit
Praise for Taneum Bambrick
“[Bambrick is] entirely committed to illuminating the intricacy of human nature.” —The Rumpus
“Vantage is a work of art which also functions as a call, as if from under the ground, a cry from water and air.”—Sharon Olds, from the introduction
“Read this book for its quotidian beauty.” —RHINO
“Vantage is stunning, a true feat of language.” —The Adroit Journal
“Within a puzzle of forms…it’s the pitch and precision of detail in Bambrick’s prose poems that glean tenderness.” —High Country News
“[Bambrick relies] on the belief that love can exist, intensely and profoundly, within a process of damage and decay.” —Poetry Northwest
“Taneum Bambrick sees, really sees, our America: blood on a baseball hat, purposeless dams, a wooden corn nut latched to a silver chain. Her clarity constantly surprises...It’s such a rigorous vision, one that acknowledges even the violence of space, the violence of sounds, the violence that ‘commodities its own impact.’”—Kaveh Akbar
