The Intimacy Trials

Reviews / Votes

"Set in seven sections of extended lyric fragments-'treble,' 'witness,' 'bass,' 'quaver,' 'ritual,' 'pitch' and 'fissure'-The Intimacy Trials begins at the beginning and expands ever outward. . . . Duncan expands and threads a storytelling lyric, weaving the past into the present, documenting history and trauma and resilience into the possibilities of both the present, and a possible future." * rob mclennan's blog * "Camouflage, song, rebirth." * Ms. Magazine, on "The Best Poetry of 2025 and 2026" * "Few poets can write with such scope and specificity as Couchois Duncan, whose work offers a dynamic ecopoetics keen on Indigenous futures beyond survivance. Couchois Duncan's work holds more than command of the erotic and more than the trope equating a femme body with the land; it has the complex associative logics of myth (and poetry for that matter). With The Intimacy Trials, Couchois Duncan asserts that there is complex comfort in tracking the disappearance of what we can inventory while ignoring what it means to outlive all but time. This is not the old language." -- Douglas Kearney, Phoenix Poets consulting editor and author of "Optic Subwoof" "As both conjurer and postapocalyptic archaeologist, Couchois Duncan holds the ability to defy gravity with her singular poetic laminations, creating intersecting narratives that swell and contract like electrical pulses of the heart. The depth of her writing is on full display in The Intimacy Trials. This lyrical archive is speculative memory and a necessary retelling, an atmospheric river of grief and survival." -- Stacy Nathaniel Jackson, author of "The Ephemera Collector"