Intimacy
SERIES:
Colorado Prize for Poetry
University Press of Colorado, Center for Literary Publishing
Winner of the 2013 Colorado Prize for Poetry
Intimacy is a series of experimental poems that play with, resist, and acknowledge complicity with received concepts of intimacy that circulate in this media-centric age. Undertaking an expansive understanding of the word “intimacy”, each poem contains a word or set of words that modifies the noun, uncovering the attending, associative and often contradictory obligations that arise in our relations with one another.
Intimacy is a series of experimental poems that play with, resist, and acknowledge complicity with received concepts of intimacy that circulate in this media-centric age. Undertaking an expansive understanding of the word “intimacy”, each poem contains a word or set of words that modifies the noun, uncovering the attending, associative and often contradictory obligations that arise in our relations with one another.
'Scary, serious, beautiful, and new, Catherine Imbriglio’s Intimacy goes far indeed in two directions that might have seemed incompatible before. On one hand, full of adapted facts and figures about how the mind works, about how the psyche fails—partly an elegy, or an obsequy—it participates in real research about the psychology of disappointment, want, and grief. That research lends gravity to Imbriglio’s stretched-out sentences, prose units that double as long, long lines. On the other hand, those lines become desperately beautiful—they have their music too: they are landscapes, orchestrations, and works for the lyre. They 'speak on behalf of what things,' 'sorting out statistical illusions,' coming after and above silence, ice, patience, melancholy, instead of blocking them out, and ending up with sentence sounds that nobody has made before, in a way that pays homage to real people and real scenes. 'When everything you know is like a windlight shifting,' read these poems of 'touch touch touch,' of seaside scenes and 'mathematical grounds'; they make everything technical seem close to you, and everything real seem clear.'
—STEPHEN BURT
'Matchmaking across dimensions,' Catherine Imbriglio connects, with a clown’s perspective, subjects as far flung as child psychology, sectarian violence in Iraq, inchworms, physics, the death of parents, and US war logs on WikiLeaks. She connects them into a rhythm that creates unsuspected varieties of intimacy, which in turn invite us into a most pleasurable intimacy with language, its possibilities of music and thought.’
—ROSMARIE WALDROP
Catherine Imbriglio is the author of Parts of the Mass (Burning Deck), which received the 2008 Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. Her poetry has appeared in American Letters & Commentary, Aufgabe, Conjunctions, Denver Quarterly, Epoch, First Intensity, New American Writing, No: A Journal of the Arts, Pleiades, Petri Press, Tarpaulin Sky, Web Conjunctions, and elsewhere. A selection of her poetry was anthologized in The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries, ed. Reginald Shepherd (University of Iowa Press, 2004). She was the 2011 recipient of the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts’ fellowship award in poetry. She teaches in the Nonfiction Writing Program at Brown University.
