The Mirror That Cleaves: On Taneum Bambrick’s Intimacies, Received
June 2022. The Amtrak is coming in. Its headlight down the track—closer, widening—falling across the bright afternoon. I’m hanging back on the concrete platform, not so much because it’s safer that way, but to avoid the summer rays. Each day hotter than the previous. The slow squeal of machinery slowing, and then stopping. Then the doors sighing open, suitcases bundled to bodies spilling out like ants. When there’s an opening, I show the ticket attendant my phone and slip in.
Later, lush green canopies melt together before miles of gravel. Cityscapes, houses, fences. Blades of grass stretching skyward. I’m coming down from the Dallas station for a wedding, 8pm after delays, where someone will pick me up at the Austin station. The café cart on the second floor is closed, sadly. I was hoping for a croissant.
In a photo I’ve taken of the window by the open seat adjacent to me, another train’s railings—just before charging out of frame altogether, my arms reflected in the glass—cut a blur through the neat rows of a wheat field. They look like matchheads, frenzied under the weight of sunset, and in the metal space between the rubber black frames securing this window and the next, the red words emergency exit descend like a dress.
The picture is deliberate. I don’t mean the field, the open sky, that I angled my phone before capturing. I’m only realizing now, writing this, that I don’t always trust my eyes, and I need to know what’s beyond the window. I need to know I’ve a way out.
It’s a few hours before my arrival, and beside me is a copy of Intimacies, Received, the second full-length collection by Taneum Bambrick. Shadowing a queer woman in the years following an abusive relationship, Intimacies, Received, a mixture of poems and prose, documents its persona’s romance with a new man in rural Spain alongside the pervasive violences—misogyny, ableism, queerphobia, and where they all converge—rooted into the fabric of memory, relationships, and everyday life.
Upon entry, Intimacies, Received immediately opens in contrast. Its first set of poems are numbered rather than titled. We start with a baby grass snake, squirming in half-squares on an open trail as the persona learns that a man she loves is a serial predator, someone who “harmed three women before her.” The contrast is metaphorical and literal—the trail’s expansivity and the persona’s internal turmoil, narrowing to a single point: a need to protect herself, to not search for a motive behind his behavior, to refuse to acknowledge the questions rising in her. What follows is a circuit of memories: a therapeutical exercise where she noted the differences between her past partners and her rapist (“their names,” she says), the moment she realized he’d had a double life (a fiancée) when he was with her, and an image he is “excited to show [her].”
Because titles are in and of themselves names—something the persona does not explicitly offer to the man she loves/her rapist—it makes sense formal titles are absent from the opening fragments. To give something a name is to give it a story, and where one might assume Bambrick is giving away too much (or too little) at the outset, this is by design. Form is key: Mentioning the rape in name only and virtually nothing else gives the persona space (distance?) to cut to the heart of what she wants to say. This is more a point of restraint rather than reluctance—the fragmentary, short lines and lack of titles are tools Bambrick use to limit what is said and how much detail is given. We are simply dropped into the occasion at hand, we are to move down this trail with Bambrick, and we are situated only with what we need to know and nothing else. The implication, or perhaps danger, is that anything else—even literal space on the page—would make room to say more than what’s necessary or desired or intended, something Bambrick tells us outright is impossible, lest the persona “prioritize self-protection / over solidarity” with the women who were also harmed.
Bambrick doesn’t stray from titles too long though. Titles are also windows that offer insight into how a piece of writing will discuss itself, often establishing a sense of mood, atmosphere, or setting, even cultural context. As we come down the trail into Spain, we come into the persona’s relationship with a man, a restaurant owner, which is where the focus shifts, albeit slightly. Beyond that many of the poems in Intimacies, Received open in a place or occupation titularly, the collection is rife with moments of disconnection, most of which are imposed in communal spaces. Bambrick moves through the poems with deft eyes, showing us how, during her time in Spain, the persona is unable to find connection and reciprocity with others in the aftermath of her assault years prior, and how she is shamed for it inadvertently, deliberately, or otherwise. The rape isn’t the focus, but it’s there, circling the edges, bleeding into the mundane. Instead, the world becomes a reminder of her alteration, and like the shutter of a camera lens, these moments come together as a sort of still-life, snapshots bound like moments of a collage.
Click, and in a meal with a group of her partner’s friends, one of the women laughs at the persona for ordering oysters, saying they smell “like a dirty woman” (a subtle, if unintentional, dig at her queerness and a later kidney infection). Click, and a former partner and queer woman, C, blames the persona for her assault, for the “single tragedy that kept [her] from fully discovering sex.” Click, and a puppy the persona rescued—but was forced to release by her partner, the Spaniard—is seen in a photo with its teeth kicked in. Click, and the Spaniard’s family laughs at her while she, startled, drops a red thong—a symbol of good luck worn for a lover—that was stuffed into her hand by his mother (“This is tradition,” the mother explains). Click, and the persona stares out at a nearby festival, her kidney infection rendering her unable to eat, drink, or participate while the Spaniard is confused at her frustration. He gives her a flower. On a road trip one day, she sees “the knives of a tractor” goring the earth while birds poke through the mess; on another, she sees turkeys shrieking and “biting the base of a barbed-wire fence,” and that feeling of being caught arises again. She goes on dates with the Spaniard, who makes her laugh until she realizes she doesn’t know a thing about him; he instead becomes “the man who assaulted [her].” Click.
This sense of tension and isolation carries through until shifting once more: In the latter half of the collection sits a piece of longform prose, “Alligators: An Essay,” which details the end of the persona’s relationship with the Spaniard beside the years before she met him. There, we learn Bambrick was seventeen when the abuse took place—a college-aged man who “liked the [panties from when she was thirteen] that had cherries on it the most.” And what we come to see is an excavation of how, as a result of the abuse, the persona would come to “look for ways in which all men resemble him” and act “occasionally irrational, even violent” in the years after the rape.
This in mind, would it be fair to say the essay covers similar ground—and might, therefore, feel repetitive to some readers—that the preceding poems do by way of the associative leaps established across them? Certainly. I’m primarily trained as an essayist, particularly the memoir essay, and I’m well aware of both the murkiness between genres—where do prose poems and lyric essays differ; the role lyrical fragmentation plays within prose; the “deep depressions that [poems and essays] make and hide in,” etc.—and that hybridity isn’t uncommon for many literary collections. Indeed, poems and essays, vehicles which allow for looking out at the world to gain a greater sense of perspective on something, aren’t opposed to one another.
And yet “Alligators: An Essay” felt out of place in my first and subsequent readings of Intimacies, Received. Why? At first I thought it was just the departure from free verse to prosaic narrative that jarred me, like “slabs of concrete toppled into [a] pond.” Had there been an extra essay or two, I don’t think it would’ve been as disruptive. To be fair though, that’s more of a matter of taste: Bambrick certainly isn’t shy on formal choices, using forms such as ekphrastic, the prose poem, the persona poem, mythmaking. Still, the essay on its own felt almost too grounded to me, too stark against the looser, fragmentary poems.
In a review, Jeevika Verma notes that “Alligators: An Essay” is the piece which best expresses the collection’s “non-linear experience of trauma.” Sure, but what this and other reviews fail to acknowledge is the function of the essay as a tool within the collection overall. I don’t so much mean the piece itself—I stand by my assessment that the piece may feel repetitive to some readers—as much as I mean that it is utilized as a kind of volta (or an essayistic braid) near the tail end of the collection. It matters that it’s “An Essay,” that Bambrick declares it as such. Verma’s assertion only captures the “swallow / coiled with gold leaves” rather than the entire mural; it is only “Sevilla / through a bent railing.”
It isn’t uncommon nowadays for poetry collections to be divided into enumerated parts (usually between three, sometimes more) which may follow some narrative arc. It’s a tidy form, one that makes everything appear “bound in shape / as if by a stretch of skin” upon first glance. Intimacies, Received isn’t separated by enumerated sections per se, but it moves between the numbered fragments with the more “poemy” poems, and the prosaic moments (“Alligators,” the title poem which alternates between prose and free verse, etc.) which all seems to loosely mimic the typical three-act collection structure. It matters because, in using the essay this way, in pulling these three things—the essay, the poems, and the fragments—around each other like “bodies [that] had been stitched together,” the book comes to read not less like a collection of poems and more like a braided essay, but rather as both and neither; a hybrid of the two forms.
What I’m also getting at is this: There are just things that can be said in poems that can’t be in said in essays, just as there are other avenues of meaning to explore within the parameters of a traditional narrative. What was originally poetic observation is now essayistic reflection and insight. The poems read less like loosely connected standalones and more like vignettes stacked atop each other until it resembles something that “could be a life.” The essay has to be introduced as an essay to avoid confusing it for a prose poem. There is no ambiguity, no hiding behind “the speaker” or any number of vehicles writers use to put distance between themselves and the occasion at hand. To this end, I’ll note my earlier use of persona throughout, rather than speaker, is deliberate; by using “An Essay,” Bambrick is telling us, simply, that everything is true. “I was raped when I was seventeen,” the persona says. “I survived.”
For The Adroit Journal, Eliza Browning writes how the movement between “genres are a way for the speaker to reclaim control over the narrative.” Similarly, Rachel Prince, for Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, calls the collection “brave,” naming it a site where Bambrick “grieves, crumbles, learns, grows and ultimately triumphs.” It’s true, on the one hand, that when a rape survivor comes forward they are revealing what happened to them. When a survivor says I was raped, there is an understanding that they are also saying, Something happened to me and I am different now because of it. This is partly because rape connotes a uniquely specific decentralization of agency—because let’s be real here, there is no other word for rape quite like rape—and partly because (despite recent years showing a slight cultural shift in believing survivors) much of contemporary discourse surrounding sexual violence is still filtered through stereotypical binaries: You are either completely obliterated by what happened, or you are fully restored, completely over it. You are forever a downtrodden victim or always a triumphant (albeit quiet, lest you make others uncomfortable) survivor.
On some level, I understand the logic—who wouldn’t choose the redemptive arc in a world where people of marginalized genders, women especially, are so often forced into and depicted in states of disempowerment? Who wouldn’t choose the wresting back of agency, the seemingly happier ending? It’s easy to want the triumphant survivor story, but things are also less complicated that way; they make everything seem over and done with. But the truth is, we do a profound disservice to our experiences if we only push ourselves to transcend them, just as we dishonor ourselves if all we are is what happened to us. There must be room for both victimhood and survival, for hurt and healing. And, again, let’s be real—must everything a survivor do be only about reclamation or control? Must it all be as cut and dry as bravery or transcendence? What if it’s something outside the binary altogether—forever different, but neither entirely obliterated nor fully restored?
To be clear, I’m not trying to come down on these reviews, but I bristled reading them, not because I found their assessments incorrect but because I found it difficult to recognize Intimacies, Received in them. They felt too close to the stereotypes, the obliteration/restoration binary. Here’s the thing: The problem with stereotypes isn’t that the portraits they paint are untrue, but that they are unfinished. This is why the framing of sharing one’s story or coming forward solely as an attempt to reclaim control or as an act of bravery feels reductive—it implies that one is attempting a return to life before the abuse, something impossible for many survivors. “I could be anyone,” Bambrick writes in “Intimacies, Received,” a persona poem near the end of the collection written in the Spaniard’s voice, “And you’d still want your life back.”
From their outset, persona poems are a tool towards building intimacy, enacting closeness. They offer the possibility of accessing a separate entity’s thoughts and, by extension, internal landscape, to which Bambrick uses the form to deliberately recircle—something a writer might do within a braided essay—to how the persona “knowingly fell into the narrative placed on [her].” In earlier poems, we learn the Spaniard is a man who minimizes the persona’s concerns, who chastises her regularly, who speaks to her as if she is a whimsical child. He dismisses a 5.3 million woman protest in Spain by claiming “most women don’t even work”; he initiates sex despite the medical risk to the persona during her kidney infection (it’s worth noting her male doctor, a supposed specialist, blames it on a lack of personal feminine hygiene); he cannot be bothered to purchase the correct medication for her and leaves her, delirious and seeing “triangles lift across [her] tongue,” to go on a trip to Denmark. It doesn’t matter that we understand this is the kind of man who sees the devastation of being raped as something as simple as wanting to return to one’s old life, the kind of man who calls his partner’s queerness into question, who only sees her as a writer when she has “a sad story” to tell, that it is all as simple as making enough money to keep her happy, that this is the story he places her into.
Rather, what we’re seeing isn’t so much what the persona’s relationship with him is built upon—the casual, everyday misogyny that men enact—but how, in assuming (subsuming?) his voice, she can allow herself to mirror what she has internalized about herself: how she has “become less of a person”; how she is trying to cleave from that internalization by giving it its own separate vessel—the poem itself—to speak through, so she can interrogate how, “more than love,” she has chosen disappointment in the name of companionship; and how global systems of interlocking subjugation and oppression have not only shaped the world and her directly, but how she is complicit within them. “How long did I think,” she wonders in “Traveling,” that “the most important place / was the place where someone wanted me.”
Moreover, that “Intimacies, Received” immediately follows “Alligators” is two-fold: Where “Alligators” offers context for the events leading up to the rape, “Intimacies, Received” draws insight into her life after; a volta following the volta of the essay. And where the collection opens with an image the man she loves wants her to see, its closing fragment ends with the persona showing a lover—it’s not quite specific if it’s the man who harmed her, C, the Spaniard, or someone else altogether—“something,” which reads as a gesture towards the collection as a whole. But more than that, in bookending the collection this way, we see the change in the persona, no longer just observing her life but participating in it. It’s a slightly easy gesture, I think, but it’s an effective one, obliging the reader to [re]consider what precedes and what follows.
And where a more traditional memoir about abuse would move in a narrative arc towards some measure of vindication by the end, Bambrick uses the poetic to hit the hallmarks of memoir whilst diverging from it entirely. This isn’t quite a memoir, nor is it entirely a book of poems, but it does invoke the act of essaying itself: The aim isn’t a flicker of hope or a beam of light at the end but an open, nuanced, and honest attempt to separate from the confines of narrative and to make the inner space needed to be seen and reflected and experienced in entirety. Ultimately, Intimacies, Received is less of an account of sexual violence or reclaiming control as it is an invitation to witness the person the persona had to become to survive.
And in the case of the person the persona had to become, how she is different by it all: A person who has “never finished with a man / without needing to repeat, in my head, / that I want him inside me.” A person I know all too well: Someone who “didn’t touch a man for seven years.”
At the time I’m writing this, this July will make eight years I’ve not let a man inside.
* * *
The picture of the emergency exit, that proof I had a way out: There was a time in my life before I needed this. You go on, it’s true. You go on and pick yourself back up and make a life for yourself, and even though you find there are days where it all isn’t so bad—happy, even—you never get over it. You just learn to live with it. How do I know this? Something happened to me and I am different now because of it.
Do you understand? I’m trying to tell you about the kind of person I am, the person I had to become.
* * *
August.
* * *
The day of the wedding is a blur of sunshine.
When I arrive at the small venue, the outdoor pavilion is strung with orange, blue, pink, and green paper banners and multi-colored chiles. Papier-mâché calaveras and skeleton patronas with painted dresses and hats. Tiny sugar skulls, piñatas, and Frida Kahlo matchboxes on the round seating tables scattered about the pavilion. Beyond it all, a small stone bird fountain beside the white wooden trellis at the end of rocky path. Sections of grass with fold-out chairs. They were legally married already, my friend and their wife, but there hadn’t been a ceremony until now—the pandemic, her medical issues—and at the altar table, I leave my wedding gift as an offering.
The morning is an age and a moment. When it’s time, my friend, to their wife, says, I promise to always watch Star Trek with you. It’s the only thing from my friend’s vows that I can remember now, but it’s the simplicity of that statement that strikes me still—to pledge oneself to spend time with someone, to walk with them through the world. To build intimacy, context. When we manufacture joy with a person we love, we are also telling them, wordlessly: Here is the proof you are precious to me. Keep it for all the bad days.
We never married, he and I, couldn’t even say we were really together, but if asked at one point what he was to me, I would’ve spread my arms to encompass the world. His cut through all the other men’s assaults. It wasn’t the physical violation—the rape, the bathroom light coming down the walls of his bedroom like a train’s—but the psychic damage that was too great, that brutal line charging all the way back to my heart. I didn’t have a choice. I had to leave him.
I wept there, out on that gravel path while the heavy yellow morning beat down. I wept over my friend’s apple-green dress. Their wife’s pink flower crown. The lovely bouquets they both held. The trellis. And I thought: So this is devotion. And I wept because I was over the moon for my friend and at the end they scooped up their wife in their strong arms and walked off towards the reception. And then I wept harder, not because I missed him still but because devotion “was something I’d never felt” from another person.
What was it that was said? “There has never been anything like this”? Yes, that’s it. I may not trust my eyes, but they’ve got nothing on my hands, always caging around my heart in the name of safety. What’s it say about me that I’ve been too afraid to share it with someone else? A cage is still a cage even if the walls are built of your own fingers. In privileging the wounded parts of me, how long have I limited myself in connecting with others? How much of my life did I think I could fit along a single margin?
The metaphor of collapsed, crumbled earth isn’t lost on me—the expansivity of the world against my own state; the years I spent regathering after him—but the version of me standing on that rocky trail can’t answer these questions. In truth, that version of me isn’t even aware of them yet. But they’re there, lurking around the edges. They’re there in the year it’s taken me to write this, in the times I’ve reread Intimacies, Received since—questions Bambrick invites the reader to uncover and take stock of within themselves.
In a photo I’ve taken through the window next to me on the train back to Dallas, a tall antiques sign pokes through the sky. In front of that, a row of delivery trucks parked behind a nearby set of tracks. In front of that, a path of rocks and then beside it—as if a before and after—paved concrete. A stop sign on the far left-hand side if you zoom in. And the window itself, stained from sun, wind, and time, casting the world in sepia. What matters about this? There’s no reflection in the glass. I’m there but I’m not. The shot’s crisp and still enough though that you’d think I was happy to linger, that I paused to take it all in. You’d think I wasn’t just a passenger being carried someplace else. That I’m not in a moment—click—about to leave all this behind.
Taneum Bambrick (@BambrickTaneum) 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.
Daniel Garcia’s (@_iloveyoudaniel) essays appear or are forthcoming in Ninth Letter, Quarterly West, Guernica, Passages North, The Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. Poems appear or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, Gulf Coast, Pleiades, Electric Literature, swamp pink (formerly Crazyhorse), and others. A recipient of prizes, scholarships, and grants from Tin House, PEN America, and others, Daniel is the InteR/e/views editor for Split Lip Magazine, a former creative nonfiction editor for GASHER Journal, a two-time Lambda Literary Emerging LGBTQ Voices Fellow, and a former Emerging Writer Fellow with SmokeLong Quarterly. Daniel’s essays also appear as Notables in The Best American Essays. Find Daniel at danielwritespoetry.com.