Patrycja Humienik

media release: “Wondrous. . . . We Contain Landscapes introduces a gorgeous, determined, and vibrant new voice to American poetry.”—Aria Aber, author of Good Girl

To whom do we belong, and at what cost? Patrycja Humienik’s debut poetry collection, We Contain Landscapes, is haunted by questions of desire, borders, and the illusion of national belonging. Bringing music and rich sensory detail to the page, these poems attend to the inextricable link between our bodies and the land. Over six ruminative and lush sections, they survey place and memory, both intergenerationally and through emotional bonds with other immigrant daughters. 

Weaving in letters, innovative forms, and meditations on devotion, sexuality, and self-deceit, We Contain Landscapes introduces a speaker who “will not turn away from the ache of this world.” For every reader who also harbors a voracious longing to encounter infinite landscapes and ways of being, this incisive collection dreams toward a more expansive idea of kinship—of becoming beloved to one another and ourselves

Patrycja Humienik, daughter of Polish immigrants, is a writer, editor, and performance artist. She has developed writing + movement workshops for the Henry Art Gallery, Arts+Literature Laboratory, Northwest Film Forum, in prisons, and elsewhere. An MFA candidate at UW-Madison, she serves as Events Director for The Seventh Wave, where she is also an editor for the Community Anthologies project. Patrycja grew up in Evanston, Illinois, and lives in Madison, Wisconsin.

Patrycja Humienik picks up where the great Polish poets of the twentieth century left off, writing of exile, war, fragmented families, and grief for a ruined environment. And yet, her mind is utterly contemporary and new, searching and witty, always striving towards a politics of solidarity with the Other––the reader, the ancestors, the daughters of immigrants. The poet’s wondrous imagination flows like water across these pages, picking up the peculiar and astonishing facts of life on earth, like ‘kiwis ripening in early December,’ a ‘sky’ like ‘a cicatrix,’ ‘the presence / of screens’ that shape memory, or ‘eyelashes beating / against time.’ We Contain Landscapes introduces a gorgeous, determined, and vibrant new voice to American poetry, a voice that dances with, exults in, and blurs the boundaries of the lyric.

—Aria Aber, author of Good Girl

Daughter of immigrants, Patrycja Humienik confronts the agonizing betrayals of nation-states, as well as the pressures of sexuality, the obliterating lure of the internet. She writes with a physicality that is utterly mesmerizing. Shot through with radiance and self-possession, Humienik’s poems are reminders that life at the edge of exorbitant longing can feel more free, more alive.

—Joanna Klink, author of The Nightfields

In We Contain Landscapes, Patrycja Humienik illuminates to us the sticky insides of longing, and the crisis of returning to ourselves in the process of returning home. This collection speaks to the heart of the immigrant daughter, and the daughter responds: yes, I speak to you / in sweat.

—Camonghne Felix, author of Dyscalculia

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