Thank you so much to Tin House for the gifted copy! This collection was released in the US on March 18th, 2025.

What does it mean to belong—to land, to lineage, to longing? In We Contain Landscapes, Patrycja Humienik doesn’t attempt to answer that question cleanly. Instead, she excavates its layers with a poet’s precision and a daughter’s ache, crafting a debut collection that is as haunted as it is humming with defiance. These poems are maps drawn in contradiction: devotion tangled with doubt, inheritance weighted with grief, queerness blooming through fractured soil.

Humienik writes from the liminal—between Poland and the U.S., between girlhood and womanhood, between being “shielded by whiteness” and aching in solidarity with the undocumented. Her speaker is the queer immigrant daughter who doesn’t quite fit the mythologies she’s been handed: of empire, of nation, of “a better life.” In poems like “Figuration” and “There's What I Think and What I Feel,” the pressures of assimilation and familial expectation coil tightly around the voice, only to be slowly unspooled with lyric tenderness and clarity. And in “Failed Essay on Repressed Sexuality,” one of my favorite pieces, Humienik distills queer grief and eroticism into something paradoxically sharp and soft—nihilistic, yet aching to be known.

Stylistically, the collection is elliptical and textured, with enjambments that mimic the movement of a restless, reaching mind. This is poetry that doesn’t resolve—it pulses, reverberates. “Cruel, how / beauty exists with no regard for goodness or the living,” the speaker observes, and this cruelty—of displacement, of memory, of want—is a current throughout. Still, these poems resist being undone by loss. They are dreamscapes and dirges. They are cracked open but not crumbling.

We Contain Landscapes is a book for anyone who’s ever lived inside a question. For the queer children of immigrants. For those of us who want to believe in something softer than borders. For those who, even in exile, are learning how to bloom.

📖 Read this if you love: poetry about intergenerational longing, queer daughterhood, or the weight of whiteness, empire, and erasure. For fans of Kaveh Akbar and Ocean Vuong.

🔑 Key Themes: Migration and Inheritance, Queerness and Repression, Nationalism and Displacement, Mother-Daughter Entanglement, Belonging Beyond Borders.