Bravery, to me, is stepping forward to confront your fears and discomforts, despite the emotions holding you back. After reading Intimacies, Received, Taneum Bambrick’s moving collection of poetry, brave is the word that most readily describes the taut, sometimes treacherous path the poet takes to reclaim her sense of self and connection to her body after a traumatic event.
Taneum Bambrick (she/they) is an author, essayist and editor, whose works have won numerous awards and accolades, including the Academy of American Poets University Prize, the Environmental Writing Fellowship, and Yemassee Chapbook Prize, as well as from poets Sharon Olds and Ocean Vuong. Her poems and essays have been featured in multiple sources including The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review and Narrative, among others. Intimacies, Received is her second collection, and in this slim volume published by Copper Canyon Press, her writing style involves 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.
The book is broken into several parts, beginning with short numbered poems remembering a partner that felt familiar but uncomfortable, all at the same time. Bambrick paints a picture of someone who “prioritizes self-protection/over solidarity. Over belief,” once she has found out about her partner’s past. A snake appears in the first poem and serves as a warning that builds a tense atmosphere surrounding the relationship described. Each poem gives a bit more insight surrounding the narrator’s sexuality and their experience with their partner. The word “rape” is used unapologetically, sandwiched by soft images reminiscent of love to show an initial state of confusion and unwillingness to accept the past. As the poems touch upon themes of fear, hopelessness, beauty and romance, readers are left feeling all that the narrator feels while navigating the ripple of emotions following an assault.
From there, a new section begins with longer poems set in rural Spain; it is like an emotional travelogue, promising surprising scenery, unexpected revelations and new knowledge. The narrator—the traveler—has a fever, possibly a UTI, kidney problems, an illness that seems difficult to treat and diagnose, and she receives several misogynist and misanthropic comments from doctors about her condition. In “Écija” there are the lines: “The doctor held my eyes./It must be the meat/ in America.” In “The Cross Festival” she mentions “The doctor explained/infections like mine/often stem from a lack/of feminine hygiene.” Treatments are questionable: in one poem, she is given medicine originally diagnosed for an infant with flu, in another, advised to sleep with “a capsule of boric acid inside myself.” It is not only a language issue that arises in her clinical interactions but a cultural one as well. Voices break into her thoughts and conversations, in different languages and with various intents: A nun who tells her the most important ingredient in baking a glazed sponge cake is the “silence of prayer” while a friend in a bar compliments her in Spanish in a coarse way to her lover not knowing she understands. Translating the “truth” is key to this poetic itinerary of self discovery.
In “Traveling,” for example, Bambrick parallels her own experiences with love and what she sees around her:
A horse tied to an old bridge. The river under it pulls
green-thin. To a woman on this train, a man whispers, Stay with me,
which also means, I have no concept of what you’ll leave. That was
what angered me.
Days ago. Gin through the carpet. Your hands drumming my knees.
How long did I think—as if biting a leash—the most important place
was the place where somebody wanted me.
Taneum Bambrick
Photo by Alexandro Zamora
The imagery of the horse forced to stay in one place as it watches the river flow forward transitions into the narrator’s anger from watching an urgent one-sided romantic interaction; that transitions then to her own memories broken apart into a staccato recitation of relatable images and then a reflection: the line “biting a leash” relates back to the horse tied to the bridge, and the woman on the train pressured to stay by a man who requests it. The narrator, too, is stuck in place watching the water flow where it wants to go while feeling tethered in place by memory’s invisible hands. So much is said and revealed through very few words; that brevity of expression and compressed emotion is indicative of Bambrick’s poetry, leaving readers with that much more impact—a kind of slow burn—at the conclusion.
Throughout this section, Bambrick uses memorable detail and unrestrained imagery to depict her surroundings, a sharp contrast to her mental turmoil and the sickness her body endures. Gruesome imagery shows up in poems such as “After Picasso’s Head of a Woman” and “The Meat Carver,” that explores a voyeuristic pleasure in watching her lover, a butcher, at work, “knifing thin slices of ham/off the glassy arc through the center of the leg/where the meat purples before the bone.”
But in “The Puppy at River Genil,” there is noticeable shift, where the desire to take action reveals itself. The poem stood out to me as a mirroring of Bambrick’s own experience, saving a puppy from an abandoned yard and sharing moments of joy only to release it back into the wild, followed by the puppy’s abuse and the return of the narrator’s fever and illness. Bambrick realizes, finally, “This is what happened/ when I refused to understand.”
Translating the truth becomes essential to her health, mental and physical, during the travelogue of self-discovery and self-recovery, and each time leads to a tumult of emotions and the return of memories surrounding the assault. She cites the burning of the city Écija and views rape drawings in the Picasso Museum, and it brings readers steps closer to the mentioning and understanding of the trauma itself, something that many other works of poetry fail to do. Her poem “Saying I Am A Survivor in Another Language” condenses that struggle into a powerful sixteen line meditation.
To call trauma by name, to acknowledge something life-changing, to paint pictures with the same pain that once broke you is the truest act of bravery, and the collection continues to do that through a section with journal-like epiphanies titled “Alligators: An Essay” and the title poem, “Intimacies, Received” with its emotional summary of experiences and poignant, yet charged imagery (“Having you was like having a baby,/ A box of matches carrying bees across a lake.”) Bambrick’s book is a visceral, emotional triumph, encapsulating the feelings of all who have been through something that changed their body and being. We witness her exploration of pain and tentative resolution of acceptance of herself in relation to the other in the final poem, where she is no longer prioritizing self-protection over solidarity:
You push your palm against my face in bed.
I imagine this is you asking for space.I am trying to warm up your nose, you say.
We laugh so hard,
but I have shown you something.
In this finely-tuned collection, Bambrick shows us close to everything we can use for renewal.—Rachel Prince
Rachel Prince is a graduate of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she studied Psychology/Neuroscience and Creative Writing with a focus on trauma and resilience. She is passionate about the role storytelling and personal narrative play in medicine and is the founder of The Heart of Medicine, a medical humanities magazine that allows pre-med/pre-health students across the U.S. to collaborate and contribute their creative work. She enjoys writing poetry and short stories as well as composing music for the piano, and her work has been published in Overachiever magazine, mOthertongue, and UMass Jabberwocky. Prince, who is a Poetry Editor of Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine works as an ophthalmic technician and hopes to combine her interests in writing and healthcare to pursue a career as a physician.