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Generally studying poetry can really feel exhilarating, like you’re lastly seeing and being seen. Different occasions it’s a slog that leaves you determined for a nap to course of what you simply learn. Patrycja Humienik’s debut poetry assortment, “We Comprise Landscapes,” is a wholesome mixture of each.
A self-described queer immigrant, Humienik considers questions of power sickness and inheritance, of a daughter’s responsibility and an immigrant’s place on the earth.
The poems make use of the canon’s go-to imagery — rivers, seas, flowers — whereas exploring new territory in spiral staircases and “un-ribboning.” There’s a sensual, ephemeral, dream-like high quality to the gathering, woven in with strains like, “Do to me what daylight does to a river.” They demand additional time to think about and deserve a second to take pleasure in.
Deep veins of nature operating all through trigger a jarring distinction with fashionable happenings — one second mild filters by means of leaves and the subsequent we’re scrolling Instagram. Juxtaposition is the secret in “We Comprise Landscapes.”
In “Salt of the Earth,” Humienik collocates going to see household in Poland along with her expertise rising up an immigrant in America. In america, her immigrant standing is a mark of disgrace from which she will keep hidden, “Shielded by whiteness,/assumed to be documented.” But when she visits her household in Poland, she is ashamed to be known as American — sentiments of rootlessness that echo amongst first- and second-generation immigrants the world over.
Valleys meet mountains, enjambment breaks up ideas. One poem is a single, two-page-long run-on sentence. One other is one quick stanza containing a collection of questions, a collaborative poem that takes that means solely when the reader pauses to reply every one, forming a dialog. “Sorry For Taking” is a panic attack-infused collection of missed calls and unhealthy cellphone connections allegorical to unheeded warning indicators of a warming local weather.
Connections are generally buried in intelligent wordplay, and linguistics make layers of that means. Within the context of a river unfazed by altering maps and borders, “the previous disrupts the present.”
Then there’s “We,” a poem that eschews anybody logical type and flows like a river, crossing paths with itself in order that chunks of it make sense to learn horizontally or vertically relying on which trickle of thought you need to observe.
All through the gathering, poems present context that enriches different entries, in order that by the point you attain the tip you can begin over and have a brand new expertise altogether.
Humienik’s is a strong debut, a conundrum as wealthy and arresting as it’s sorrowful and celebratory and nuanced.
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