We Contain Landscapes

Named A Best Debut Book of the Year by Debutiful

"Wondrous. . . . We Contain Landscapes introduces a gorgeous, determined, and vibrant new voice to American poetry."—Aria Aber, author of Good Girl

To whom do we belong, and at what cost? Patrycja Humienik’s debut poetry collection, We Contain Landscapes, is haunted by questions of desire, borders, and the illusion of national belonging. Bringing music and rich sensory detail to the page, these poems attend to the inextricable link between our bodies and the land. Over six ruminative and lush sections, they survey place and memory, both intergenerationally and through emotional bonds with other immigrant daughters.

Weaving in letters, innovative forms, and meditations on devotion, sexuality, and self-deceit, We Contain Landscapes introduces a speaker who “will not turn away from the ache of this world.” For every reader who also harbors a voracious longing to encounter infinite landscapes and ways of being, this incisive collection dreams toward a more expansive idea of kinship—of becoming beloved to one another and ourselves."Raw and intimate, these are refreshingly candid poems."—Publishers Weekly

"A moving, cohesive work animated by questions of diaspora, agency, language, and borders."—Electric Literature, A Most Anticipated Poetry Collection of 2025

“I loved the voice in these poems: so full of life and love for life, in all its contradiction and pain.”—Stanford Reading Center

"Patrycja Humienik picks up where the great Polish poets of the twentieth century left off, writing of exile, war, fragmented families, and grief for a ruined environment. And yet, her mind is utterly contemporary and new, searching and witty, always striving towards a politics of solidarity with the Other––the reader, the ancestors, the daughters of immigrants. The poet's wondrous imagination flows like water across these pages, picking up the peculiar and astonishing facts of life on earth, like 'kiwis ripening in early December,' a 'sky' like 'a cicatrix,' 'the presence / of screens' that shape memory, or 'eyelashes beating / against time.' We Contain Landscapes introduces a gorgeous, determined, and vibrant new voice to American poetry, a voice that dances with, exults in, and blurs the boundaries of the lyric." —Aria Aber, author of Good Girl

"Daughter of immigrants, Patrycja Humienik confronts the agonizing betrayals of nation-states, as well as the pressures of sexuality, the obliterating lure of the internet. She writes with a physicality that is utterly mesmerizing. Shot through with radiance and self-possession, Humienik’s poems are reminders that life at the edge of exorbitant longing can feel more free, more alive."—Joanna Klink, author of The Nightfields

"In Patrycja Humienik's book, We Contain Landscapes, there is strangeness around every corner—the speaker 'argues like a window,' a 'head is full of fragments,' or how the 'digital leaves teeth marks on my thinking.' Here are intensely beautiful poems that arrange perception and then rearrange it, in the way that identity and memory do." —Victoria Chang, author of With My Back to the World

"In We Contain Landscapes, Patrycja Humienik illuminates to us the sticky insides of longing, and the crisis of returning to ourselves in the process of returning home. This collection speaks to the heart of the immigrant daughter, and the daughter responds: yes, I speak to you / in sweat." —Camonghne Felix, author of DyscalculiaPatrycja Humienik, daughter of Polish immigrants, is a writer, editor, and teaching artist. Her work can be found in The New Yorker, Gulf Coast, West Branch, Poetry Daily, Poetry Society of America, The Slowdown Show, and elsewhere. She has developed writing and movement workshops for Brooklyn Poets, The Seventh Wave, Arts+Literature Laboratory, Northwest Film Forum, Henry Art Gallery, and in prisons. Patrycja grew up in Evanston, Illinois, and currently lives in Madison, Wisconsin.