"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