Vantage - Softcover

Bambrick, Taneum

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0986093807 ISBN 13: 9780986093807

Publisher: American Poetry Review, 2019

Synopsis

Vantage is a fictionalized account of the poet’s real experiences 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. While working there she found that reservoirs foster a uniquely complex community―from fish biologists to the owners of luxury summer homes―and became interested in the issues and tensions between the people of that place. The idea of power, literal and metaphorical, was present in every action and encounter with bosses and the people using the river. The presence of a young woman on the crew irritated her older, male co-workers who’d logged, built houses, and had to suffer various forms of class discrimination their entire lives. She found throughout this experience that their issues, while not the same, were inherently connected to the suffering of the lands they worked. Introduction by Sharon Olds.

About this title

About the Author

Taneum Bambrick is currently a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Her chapbook, Reservoir, was selected by Ocean Vuong for the 2017Yemassee Chapbook Prize. A graduate of the University of Arizona’s MFA program, she is the winner of an Academy of American Poets University Prize, a Susanna Colloredo Environmental Writing Fellowship from the Vermont Studio Arts Center, and the 2018 BOOTH Nonfiction Contest. She lives in Ellensburg, Washington.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

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 a
nd 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.

GAPS

You’re easy for me because I have a daughter, Jim said. But you can’t forget how
you look to us. Ex-construction-ex-loggers. Pushing sixty. You’re a squirrely thing.
The music you like. If you could let it be quiet on the highway. Six in the morning.
We’re all watching the hill-light cut off the wind turbines. We don’t want to talk
about our wives. It’s true they should let you drive. That’s why I do, but who
shoveled the tires out. For you. Painted over the torn fence. Hard to take you
seriously as a guy who’s had a saw through his face. Watched a razor pluck stitches
off his glued eye. I’m not denying this is a shit hole. It’s the last one, though. Our
careers. Think how easily you got here. I know you try you scrape your little arms
up. You’re right. They should handle you. It goes both ways. None of it’s you,
really. Just you in this place.

About this edition

• Publisher: American Poetry Review
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 0986093807
• ISBN 13: 9780986093807
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 88