Taneum Bambrick’s poetry collection Vantage is a disgusting read, but in the best way possible. Bambrick utilizes her skillful, objective writing style to depict her days as a member of the clean-up crew stationed in the flooded town of Vantage, Washington. The scenes of Vantage are not pretty, showing an honest look at what the job entails: cleaning up corpses, animal and human, harassment from her older, male co-workers, as well as a strange beauty. In this interview, we asked Bambrick about her experiences working the Columbia River, and how she processed them through writing.
How has your work as a garbage collector changed how you view society, particularly consumption?
This is such a thoughtful question—one I’ve never answered before but think a lot about. I notice waste, how much I produce. All day I keep an accidental log of all the garbage I’ve created since I woke up. I notice trash on the side of the road, and I think about the person/people who will have to go pick it up.
What did you expect the job to be like before you started? How were your expectations subverted?
Before I started I thought my job would involve park “maintenance,” but I was too young to understand that maintenance is a word people use to make cleaning sound fancy. I imagined mowing grass or monitoring park spaces—moving rattlesnakes out of campsites, asking people to put their fires out during the burn ban, etc. I didn’t realize I would be the only woman on the crew, working with people much older than me. I didn’t think I would spend a lot of my time feeling afraid.
On a more positive note, I also didn’t anticipate how strong picking up garbage would make me. I learned a lot, too, like how to break an apple in half with my hands, how to tie a square knot, and how to talk to people unlike myself in a lot of ways.
How have your feelings about that job changed over time, if at all?
It’s been 10 years since I worked there, so my memories of it are a little scattered—like all memories are—and sometimes I wonder if those memories have been skewed by reading these poems over and over again. The poems are as close to the truth as I could get them, but sometimes the truth in a poem is more emotional than it is literal. Sometimes, I feel like I miss the job and the place. I feel a little haunted by that time in my life.
Many of your poems portray the death and violence you encountered while working at the reservoir. In your opinion, how much of that violence was unavoidable/natural, and how much of it was caused by humans?
So much of it was caused by humans. The worst of it was. I’m thinking first of the herd of elk that jumped off a cliff after being scared by a loud sound—we assumed either a gunshot or a sound from a jet ski or boat in the reservoir. I never thought of sound as a potential form of violence before I worked on the Columbia River.
Your writing style takes a more objective stance, letting the content speak for itself. How did you decide on this tone for your book?
This is such a smart question that demonstrates very close reading. I appreciate it so much. Objectivity isn’t something I am good at in real life, but is definitely something I practice on the page. I am very interested in what results in that kind of looking: holding as many perspectives as I can in the same space. I was never interested in calling anyone bad or guilty in this book. Sometimes the speaker in the poems—who is more or less me—is violent. Sometimes she is the recipient of violent comments or actions. People and situations are complex, especially when housed in harmful structures. I wanted to draw more attention to the failures of those harmful structures. How we treat each other when we don’t have what we need to feel safe, or to thrive.
What do you feel is often left out when discussing climate change/environmental clean-up in popular media?
A lot of my personal research focuses on environmental racism, and writers and activists who devote their careers to drawing attention to the ways in which BIPOC communities are disproportionately impacted by climate change. One writer I recommend is Craig Santos Perez, who is writing a series of poetry collections titled Unincorporated Territories that investigate the intersecting impacts of colonialism and climate change on the Pacific Islands, particularly O’ahu and Guåhan.
What was your intention in adding the various “characters”(Jim, Grayson, Sara, etc.) in your book? How did writing about them affect how you think about their actions now?
This element of Vantage borrows a lot from fiction. I was interested in character development, exposition, plot, dialogue and other prose elements while writing this. I wanted the book to feel hybrid. Hybridity resists categorization, drawing attention to the flaws and limits of the impulse to categorize anything. Writing persona poems (poems in a voice that is not your own) helped me to engage more empathetically with people who hurt me. It helped me, again, understand the way the structure of the company that owned the dams positioned us against each other. The ways in which gender and class inform and complicate each other.
What place does beauty have in your memory of the reservoir/in your book?
I love this question. When I said earlier that I feel haunted by that time in my life, I am thinking about how it felt to walk around the desert all day, spearing up trash. The part of the river gorge I worked on was covered in sand. Even though the job was disgusting, I doubt I’ll ever have the chance to work in such a beautiful place again.
