Reviewed by Aubrey Case
Tin House Press, 96 pages, $16.95, 2025
Do you ever find yourself lying down, halved, at the bottom of the stairs as you stare up at footprints on the ceiling? If night visits your door with a tin full of vegan cookies, then this beautiful whirlwind might be a good choice for your next read. Patrycja Humienik’s debut poetry collection, We Contain Landscapes, guides the reader through an expedition of womanhood, longing, sexuality, family, immigration, and a dazzling self-exploration of identity through her contemporary poems. This book will leave you lying on the floor in deep introspection, and should optimally be read on a dreary day with rain tapping rhythmically on the window. You’ll wonder whether it was you who finished the collection, or the collection who finished you.
Beginning with the powerful “An Anchor Is an Argument,” Humienik takes us back to childhood—lying in bed and listening to a thunderstorm, “Counting the seconds between the flash and stampede,” though I would have been much less afraid if I imagined the thunder was horses—then snaps us back to the present reality of womanhood, listening carefully at night “in case the sound has a motive,” a sentiment that leaves me clutching my keys between white-knuckled fingers as I walk to my car in the dark. This poem is full of beautiful metaphors for growing up and life itself, painting a vivid image of the uncomfortable experience life can be and daring to call attention to the overlooked moments. It acknowledges what is forgotten to time, pieces of life fading from memory like the ending to a piano piece. Immediately, Humienik is setting a tone of introspection and reflection, telling us as readers to buckle up and prepare to sit with our thoughts.
The next poem to grace the page is “Eros and Sorrow,” the origin of the collection’s title. This piece taps into the complications of sexuality and the conflicting multitudes we can contain, from a “Bowl of honey pelvis” to “a hurricane wept into 29 tabs open.” Exploring the confusing and elusive nature of the internal world, which is too grand and diverse and fluid to be mapped, this poem takes us on a rollercoaster of frustration and earthly metaphor that comes to the halting conclusion that “We contain landscapes. / They do not belong to us.” We are wonderfully complex, and always changing, and horribly influenced by our environment in ways beyond our control. The deep longing and desperation within the poem as the narrator vainly attempts to understand herself feels to me like the turmoil of an existential breakdown and reluctant, bitter acceptance of the answer to the ever-present question: “who am I?” Humienik explores this question deeply throughout her poems, tapping into multiple layers of her being and prodding them under the microscope of figurative language.
Varying strongly in form and delivering a cathartic punch to the face is the poem “We,” towards the middle of the collection. At a quick glance it may seem like words thrown at random onto a page, but when put together these words take on a new life, drowning us in a harshly delicate rendering of the collective experience of longing. This poem speaks directly to the reader, drawing us into the sporadic wonders of what it means to be a collective and the ways in which we try—so desperately—to connect with each other and invent new methods for that feeling of belonging and community. Humienik gives us a taste of Polish, a language spoken by her immigrant family, sharing that “we” is “my,” but “not possession: it’s not mine,” leaving us to wonder if this longing and belonging is something we have or merely something we experience in passing, like grief flowing to and fro as waves on the ocean. There are always questions we can be led to ask, and Humienik knows exactly how to get us there.
If you’re ready to have your world dumped out in front of you like a box of miscellaneous junk to be picked-through and rearranged into a collage of life, We Contain Landscapes is practically calling your name. Prepare your comfortable blankets, prepare your box of tissues, and prepare to endure a hurricane of emotions. These poems will be your hurt and your comfort.