A Conversation with Patrycja Humienik
BY SWATI SUDARSAN
Patrycja Humienik is the author of We Contain Landscapes (Tin House, 2025), selected as a New York Public Library Best New Poetry Book. An editor and teaching artist, Patrycja has developed writing and movement workshops for Arts+Literature Laboratory, The Seventh Wave, Northwest Film Forum, Henry Art Gallery, and in prisons. Her work can be found in The New Yorker, Gulf Coast, West Branch, Poetry Daily, Poetry Society of America, The Slowdown Show, and elsewhere.
Swati Sudarsan: I’m floored by how page after page of this book maintains such a delicate rigor of language, and is so thematically tight. I can feel this pulsating obsession in your words, in the white spaces, in the ordering of the poems. I walk away from this capacious collection with the word “longing” lodged into my brain. I can’t get it out. It sits adjacent to nostalgia and desire, but also far apart, as its own entity. There are many instances of longing in your book I come back to. The longing to topple empire, to queer your life and to break the linearity of time.
What is the longing that generated the genesis of this book?
Patrycja Humienik: That longing goes way back, to before I was born. It has to do with being conceived in one place and born in another. I appreciate the distinction in your question between desire and longing; there is grief in the etymology of the word “longing.” To immigrate for the potential of a better life—that incredible risk is longing enacted, and it is full of loss.
The longing that conspired the genesis of this book goes even further back than my conception. It goes back generations. I often wonder where the longings of the people who came before us might be stored in our very bodies, in one’s genetic make-up and dreaming. Particularly the longings that people had to tuck away, perhaps out of shame or other pressures of survival.
SS: I was lucky enough to get an early copy of We Contain Landscapes, which contains a letter to readers from you that says your book is “in part for my younger selves” and that “longing is the state most familiar to me.” It evokes for me the idea that this book is about memory. Fragmented. Lost. Reshaped. Re-remembered. Much like a landscape. Can you talk to us about how memory and landscape relate to one another for you?
PH: In landscape and memory, I’m interested both in what is visible and what goes unseen. Since I could not, until I was 19, see the place I was conceived in—I could not until adulthood visit where the rest of my family lives because of my parents’ then undocumented status—I had a romanticized and fragmented sense of Poland. That mythological homeland was constructed in my mind in large part by fragment: fragments of memories my parents rarely shared, the occasional photograph with only fragments of the landscapes they grew up in. Is memory ever complete, is memory ever not fragment? Can we ever perceive the entirety of a landscape?
Embedded in a landscape, in its elements, are layers of time. And both memory and place are legacies of invention. Which is why both compel and disturb me so much. Edward Said writes about this in “Invention, Memory, and Place,” in the context of historical memory and a socially constructed sense of place—the narratives invented about place in service of nationalist projects, which people reach for “to give themselves a coherent identity, a national narrative, a place in the world.” There is a particular complexity to the relationship between landscape and memory and nation for me in terms of Poland’s changing borders, the political project of land mapped and remapped over centuries.
I am fascinated by the ways memory and landscape are co-constructed by time. When I look out at a landscape, I am confronted with, and confounded by, the scale of geological time.
SS: The opening poem, “An Anchor is an Argument” declares, “Growing up, I despised the metronome / its insistence on orderly time, the lie.” In many ways, I see your collection as a reconstitution of time itself, in order to keep alive what is lost across generations and migrations to the annals of history.
How does your book aim to deal with the oppression of time itself when it comes to the practice of evoking memory?
PH: Evoking memory can be painful, messy. This is one of the gifts and dangers of writing and reading. Reading is confrontation with our interior. I’m sitting with your striking phrase “the oppression of time” and wondering whether it is time itself or a linear sense of time that is the oppressive force. Past, present, and future live in us, compose our lives, simultaneously. The resurfacing of spirals throughout the book is one way I attempted to reckon with this, as well as beginning the book with the question of endings. But these were not conscious choices at the time of writing the poems. I let my obsessions lead.
SS: An important throughline in the collection is the precision of beauty. To me, many of these poems dance around the meaning-making of beauty. For example, in “Holding Ground,” we are told, “beauty is exacting.” In “Recurring,” you write, “beauty exists with no regard for goodness or the living.” In “On Belonging,” we are invited to think about the “doctrine of beauty in excess.”
In writing this book, where did you begin, and then arrive, with your sensibility of beauty?
PH: I began with obsession and doubt. I am still arriving. Ideas about beauty, beauty as regime, still discipline me in ways I try to undo. Having been disciplined into antiquated ideas of womanness and heteronormative ideas of beauty, I have to regularly ask myself whose gaze I am looking through. I attempted writing about the ideas I’ve inherited about beauty in a failed essay years ago. In the book, in poems, I was able to get into the mess of it in a way that felt truer to me. I think because the very act of making a poem unavoidably involves questions of beauty and pleasure, via attending to shape and sonics and syntax, the image, the line.
I hold beauty close. I let it go. What I do know is that beauty—beauty which touches all senses, beauty beyond doctrine—keeps me alive. Beauty reaches for that part of us that poets have been writing toward for centuries.
I’ve quoted this elsewhere, but there’s a passage in Mahmoud Darwish’s long poem “Mural,” translated by Berger and Hammami (a text I return to again and again), that reads: “Beauty takes me to the beautiful / and I love your love, freed from itself and its signs.”
SS: Your collection sings with the richness of vocabulary around nature, flowers, earth, and rock. What has your presence in nature been like, and did you ever study it?
PH: My inclination is to say no, but that would discredit the spaciousness of the verb “study.” There are many kinds of study, including study outside of institutions, in relationship with other people and all forms of life. I have spent a lot of time outside with varying plant life and landscapes across place; I lived for a decade in Colorado and five years in Seattle before moving back to the midwest, and those varying ecologies have imprinted themselves upon my thinking.
The beauty and mystery of light, for instance, is inexhaustible to me: shadows cast by leaves on a sidewalk, a sunset, moonrise, fireflies, stars. Deceivingly simple things. The book is full of water; I’ve babbled in other interviews about how rivers, lakes, and the ocean are an unending source of contemplation, embodiment, and respite for me. I think often of Natalie Diaz’s “The First Water Is the Body”: “This is not juxtaposition. Body and water are not two unlike things . . .”
I’m hesitant about identifying as a nature poet and curious about terms like ecopoetics. I wonder about the implied separation. My relationship to language is not separate from my relationship to place; wherever we live, no matter how urban, we are in relationship with nature. I am a lifelong student of the more-than-human world.
SS: One of my absolute favorite lines (like I would get it tattooed on me) is “Easy to confuse habit with ritual, / ritual with devotion, devotion with desire.” It’s inside one of my favorite poems of the collection, “On Devotion.” I almost want to play fuck, marry, kill with ritual, devotion, and desire . . . No! I won’t do it.
Can you imagine the shame we would feel as immigrant daughters, putting that in a professional interview? Maybe it would be more like, shame for having caused shame.
So instead I will ask: Between ritual, devotion, and desire, which do you inhabit in your day-to-day life most often? And also, importantly, which of the three do you wish to inhabit most often?
PH: Oh! I love the behind-the-scenes version of this question! Fuck desire, kill ritual, marry devotion? Kill desire? No. I don’t want ritual or desire to die . . .
I inhabit desire most often. I play with and believe in ritual, but struggle with consistency. Though I do believe desire is a life force, I wish to inhabit devotion most often. I’m still learning what that looks like in my days and relationships.
SS: I feel a kinship with that answer. I think I would choose the same exact answer. To be devoted to devotion. But now, I am going to be capricious. I want to undo the answer I helped you build.
The more I think about it, your collection encourages the queering of the known. By this, I mean your collection is constantly questioning ideas we take for granted, arranging and rearranging these truths, and pushing the reader to question their own faith in inherited definitions of these words. It becomes this rigorous process of “un-defining” what we know. So perhaps there is a more watery, ephemeral way of living we can reach for, beyond this hierarchy between ritual, devotion, and desire. How do you braid these together? And how does that inform your work as an artist?
PH: Yes. Question-asking, and refining my questions, is vital to my work as an artist. As is this braiding you invite. I am fond of the number three (how Catholic of me) and of undoing illusions of separation.
Your question reminds me of a performance I was part of a long time ago, in which the audience was guided along the Boulder creek, dancers in and out of the water and in the woods alongside. There was a quieter moment in the trees the audience was brought to, about two thirds of the way through, where the music stilled—we sat braiding each other’s hair. I think there was ritual, devotion, and desire there.
SS: A longing stirred in me as I read the epistolary poems, “Letter to Another Immigrant Daughter” series. I was floating somewhere in the land between tenderness and the erotic in those poems. To you, what is the difference between a letter to an immigrant daughter, and a letter to a lover?
PH: Ooh! What is the difference? One of my enduring obsessions is the romance of friendship! Queerness has gifted me this. I am very curious about romance as a verb. It’s alarming to make grandiose statements about what the role of the poet is, but a crucial part of being a poet to me is romancing our lives and relationships. To practice romance is to be bewildered by mystery—the mysteries of living, the mysteries of one another. People use the word romanticize, but that implies a kind of idealization I’m less interested in. I want to really see, experience. To move closer to the sensualities of being alive.
SS: I’ve followed your work for some time now, and I know your collection was originally called Anchor Baby. You still have an exquisite poem with that title in this collection, and the image of anchors, especially their burial, stays with me. When did you decide the collection needed a new title?
PH: The book got picked up under that title as I was literally packing up all my belongings to move from Seattle back to the midwest. I was in conversation with the thoughtful team at Tin House about it for months, and ultimately decided, that autumn, back in the region of my childhood, that it wasn’t right. Anchor Baby suggests a project more rigorously engaged with immigration, perhaps overtly engaging with documents and legislation. I returned to We Contain Landscapes, the title of an old chapbook project that I’d initially thought was separate from this book, as fragments and echoes of those poems ended up in this one—a fitting journey considering the book’s engagement with returns, spirals, and nonlinearity. The title change involved trusting the magic of revision, of writing as a collaboration with time.
SS: Part of the heartbreak that permeates throughout this collection is the difficulty of defining the self. Much of the self is constructed, from an early age, through our understanding of others. There is a tension I feel in these pages, between the desire to arrive into daughterhood, and the ache to break free from it. What does being a daughter, in the ideal sense, mean to you?
PH: I want to shed the aspects of daughterhood that demand self-betrayal, while honoring the sacrifices my parents endured for me to be here at all. I am indebted to all that they have done, and missed out on, in order for me to get to live this beautiful, achy, bewildering life. To honor this without making a self-sacrificing performance of it, to relate as honestly as possible despite chasms between us—I haven’t figured that out yet.
SS: To close out, I just want to ask, what are the lines of obsession you are contending with in your new work?
PH: I have been obsessing over the figure of the Muse, and thinking a lot about romance and laughter. My relationship to dance is also resurfacing more in new work. In poetry and prose, I am contending with my ongoing obsession with intergenerational stories and omission, with the undocumented desires of the women who came before me. We will see what emerges . . . I rarely prescribe an “about” to my work before writing it. I just have to write.
