Intimacies, Received
Intimacies, Received signals agency, as trauma is held to the light and finally named.
In this astonishing second collection by Taneum Bambrick, violence hides in the glint of the carving knife—every intimacy a shadow, every memory a maze to navigate. Set primarily in rural Southern Spain, Intimacies, Received moves through streets and fields, households and years, following a survivor of sexual assault as she painstakingly reassembles a narrative of self. A brilliant storyteller, Bambrick builds through palimpsest—layering vivid imagery to recall embodiment and dissociation, illness and isolation, queer female sexuality amidst acts of misogyny—utilizing varied forms including ekphrasis, persona, and a lyric essay. Ultimately, Intimacies, Received signals agency, as trauma is held to the light and finally named.
Taneum Bambrick is the author of Intimacies, Received (Copper Canyon Press, 2022) and Vantage, which was selected by Sharon Olds for the APR / Honickman First Book Award (American Poetry Review, 2019). Her chapbook, Reservoir, was selected by Ocean Vuong for the 2017 Yemassee Chapbook Prize. She is the winner of an Academy of American Poets University Prize, an Environmental Writing Fellowship from the Vermont Studio Arts Center, and the 2018 BOOTH Nonfiction Contest. She was a 2020 Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, and has received scholarships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She is the Reviews Editor at Pleiades Magazine and a Dornsife Fellow in Creative Writing and Literature in the PhD program at USC.
