Vantage - Paperback

by Taneum Bambrick (Author)

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.

Author Biography

T Bambrick (formerly 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.