Vantage

Taneum Bambrick

APR/Honickman First Book Prize winner

Winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize, selected by Sharon Olds (who writes the introduction), Vantage is a fictionalized account of the poet’s time spent working as the only woman on a six-person garbage crew around the reservoirs of two massive dams. Bambrick began writing poems in order to document the forms of violence she witnessed towards the people and the environment of the Columbia River. Power—literal and metaphorical—runs through the collection and its stories, as Bambrick finds connection across the lines.

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ISBN: 9780983300885

Format: Hardcover

ISBN: 9780986093807

Format: Paperback

Litter

I become a part of this garbage crew
empty cans along
the Wanapum pool.
Peel condoms off rock
beside fire pits—
call them snakeskins.
I learn quick.
When there’s a hoof
in the road I know
to grope through the ditch
for the rest of the goat.
Sling bags so they won’t split,
my uniform juiced with intestines
of liquefied King Salmon.
I shovel a pit bull
from a plastic tub
in a parking lot—he’s dense
and flat at the belly,
a figurine.
I stop dry heaving
over the dead-animal-dumpster
at head quarters, even as it vibrates
with maggots, the stink
generating its own heat.
And as the torso
of a man is fished from the river
I wade in to my knees.
Watching for bones, coils
of skin, I try to imagine
his knife-bisection
at the hips, the sound
of a spine snapped.
My litter grabbers outstretched,
I’m combing for the bottom half.

About the Author

Taneum Bambrick is the author of Intimacies, Received (Copper Canyon Press, Sept 2022) and Vantage, which was selected by Sharon Olds for the 2019 American Poetry Review/Honickman first book award (APR 2019). Her chapbook, Reservoir, was selected by Ocean Vuong for the 2017 Yemassee Chapbook Prize. A graduate of the University of Arizona’s MFA program, 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 …

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Reviews

“Vantage is a moving, radical work of art, written in a quiet clear voice. Taneum Bambrick has given us an extraordinary first book. Part of its freight has to do with ecological devastation, told with no voluptuous sentiment. Not ‘told’ so much as seen―the ferocious images not metaphor but reality. Not ideas but things.” ―Sharon Olds, from the introduction

“Vantage is stunning, a true feat of language. It complicates what we think we know without ever turning away from its root—the destruction of our planet, our bodies, our selves.” —The Adroit Journal

“These poems are tense, tight, and utterly devastating in their clear-eyed examination of the harms we commit against the land and each other.”—Orion Magazine