Book Review: Patrycja Humienik’s powerful debut poetry collection is a conundrum worth mulling over

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 17/03/2025 (236 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Sometimes reading poetry can feel exhilarating, like you are finally seeing and being seen. Other times it’s a slog that leaves you desperate for a nap to process what you just read. Patrycja Humienik’s debut poetry collection, “We Contain Landscapes,” is a healthy mix of both.

A self-described queer immigrant, Humienik considers questions of chronic illness and inheritance, of a daughter’s duty and an immigrant’s place in the world.

The poems make use of the canon’s go-to imagery — rivers, seas, flowers — while exploring new territory in spiral staircases and “un-ribboning.” There’s a sensual, ephemeral, dream-like quality to the collection, woven in with lines like, “Do to me what sunlight does to a river.” They demand extra time to imagine and deserve a moment to bask in.

Deep veins of nature running throughout cause a jarring contrast with modern happenings — one moment light filters through leaves and the next we’re scrolling Instagram. Juxtaposition is the name of the game in “We Contain Landscapes.”

In “Salt of the Earth,” Humienik collocates going to see family in Poland with her experience growing up an immigrant in America. In the United States, her immigrant status is a mark of shame from which she can stay hidden, “Shielded by whiteness,/assumed to be documented.” Yet when she visits her family in Poland, she is ashamed to be called American — sentiments of rootlessness that echo among first- and second-generation immigrants the world over.

Valleys meet mountains, enjambment breaks up thoughts. One poem is a single, two-page-long run-on sentence. Another is one short stanza containing a series of questions, a collaborative poem that takes meaning only when the reader pauses to answer each one, forming a conversation. “Sorry For Taking” is a panic attack-infused series of missed calls and bad phone connections allegorical to unheeded warning signs of a warming climate.

Connections are sometimes buried in clever wordplay, and linguistics make layers of meaning. In the context of a river unfazed by changing maps and borders, “the past disrupts the current.”

Then there’s “We,” a poem that eschews any one logical form and flows like a river, crossing paths with itself so that chunks of it make sense to read horizontally or vertically depending on which trickle of thought you want to follow.

Throughout the collection, poems provide context that enriches other entries, so that by the time you reach the end you could start over and have a new experience altogether.

Humienik’s is a powerful debut, a conundrum as rich and arresting as it is sorrowful and celebratory and nuanced.

___

AP book reviews: https://apnews.com/hub/book-reviews