Patrycja Humienik, daughter of Polish immigrants, is a writer, editor, and teaching artist. She is the author of We Contain Landscapes (Tin House, 2025), selected as a New York Public Library Best New Poetry Book. She 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. Assistant Editor Shlagha Borah conducted the interview.
Donate to The Offing! Our Patreon supporters received early access to this Q&A with Patrycja Humienik and received other perks. The Offing pays our contributors, and we appreciate the help of all our supporters in sustaining our work.
◆
Shlagha Borah: I want to start us outside of, but not completely unrelated to, poetry. Can we talk a little about movement? When I think of your poetry and your persona, I think of flow– rivers, dance, the lyric, the body. It seems to me that you carry ancient knowledge of the rhythm and music that surround you, and you also bring in years of experience as a performance artist. How do you then utilize language as a container for all these maximalist elements?
Patrycja Humienik: I love the wording of this question and the weaving in of rivers into movement and poetics. Language is ancient and ongoingly transforming itself and us. Like the body, like water. I’ve spoken at length about water and my relationship to it. I teach workshops in that vein because I am a lifelong student of water, and want to invite others into that. I’ve been thinking a lot about water as method in my poetics and learning from bodies of water in relationship to ideas, to the image. I am still finding language for what that poetics even is, but I don’t think of the body as separate from water or the land. That’s both a political orientation and an artistic one. My journey as a writer artist is a lifelong commitment, and the word “flow” is an entirely mysterious force to me. I’m really drawn to mystery as a generative part of my practice. I’m still learning how to show up for that and give it enough spaciousness and be spontaneous as a writer-artist-mover, while also having some kind of container. This can look like feeling my feet and wiggling my toes while I write, to remind myself of the container of my body. There’s so much mess and spilling over that happens in We Contain Landscapes and I’m not sure the questions and obsessions of my first book can ever be fully answered. But I try to show up repeatedly to the questions and look at them from different vantages. I’m interested in inviting both rigor and play in my process, which for me involves the body.
SB: There’s so much expectation of seriousness from women writers so I love that you’re incorporating play into that. You said something about us not being separate from the land. In an interview, you said, “I’m hesitant about identifying as a nature poet and curious about terms like ecopoetics. I wonder about the implied separation.” Frankly, this collection redefines ecopoetics for me by acknowledging the geopolitical complexities of borderlands and natural life, while carving a kind of manifesto in its own way. Tell us about your approach toward ecopoetics. Who or what did you study?
PH: One part of this is the study of the non-human living world, and having an ongoing relationship with bodies of water, with plant life, with whatever place I’m living in, which was crucial to making this book. I’ve reached toward the writers, artists, makers who acknowledge the depth of that connection and who have their own practices of that reverence and curiosity. Ana Mendieta and the literal imprints of her body onto the land that she would leave. The Lakota phrase “Water is life.” The poetry of Natalie Diaz and Layli Long Soldier has been so instructive for me. Ecopoetics for me has also been about questioning the limits of what study is and where it happens. Study for me includes dancing outside.
I have a dear friend, Shilpi, one of the artists that I write in the book in the series,“Letter to Another Immigrant Daughter,” and she and I spent quite a bit of time improvising and dancing in different landscapes together. That was some of the unintended study for this book, being in relationship to land in this playful and curious way. And there are so many thinkers and books, like Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging, that exploding open of the questions of belonging in place and and ancestral ties, and Bhanu Kapil, whose relationship to place and making in a book like The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers is so collaborative, reaching across borders, that it opens up the study of one’s relationship to land.
I’ve talked about my relationship to Polish poets and recognizing, as mentioned in the poem “Borderwound,” that so many of those poets, their origins and birthplaces no longer belong to Poland. So all of that, just the history of my reading life and my taking in art has been one big question mark regarding place. While simultaneously being a person who’s interested in taking a walk where I live and taking these large questions and this spinning global mess of it all paired with looking very closely at a flower on my walk. For me, ecopoetics is not separate from poetics.
SB: In the very first poem of the collection, “An Anchor Is an Argument,” you write, “A child is the wrong technology for dreaming.” This reminds me of Baldwin’s quote, “The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality.” I want to hear you talk about the relationship between morality and argument for you, and the tensions between the subjective and objective.
PH: We’re having this conversation on a day (Oct 7) that marks globally, a moment that is actually connected to a much older history of violence and occupation, and I can’t not think of the many, many children who have been slaughtered with the aid of my tax dollars. This James Baldwin quote is often heavy on my mind. I cannot stop thinking about that moment when the children in Palestine helda press conference, asking the world to intervene. The question of children in this book is what we own at all, what we can belong to, what belongs to us. I’m uninterested in the way that nation states define that for us. I’m so much more interested in the orientation that Baldwin describes.
Morality is a word I am curious about. I’m not interested in imposing any kind of way of being on other people, but I am interested in the dignity of all human life. I am interested in refusing the death cult of this society. I invite that conversation with this book, of wanting to widen this “we” and this love. I believe in that as a political orientation and I suppose a moral one, but I’m still thinking about that word. I appreciate you putting it in conversation with argument because perhaps making art is an argument for human life. Then again, art has been weaponized in so many ways. There are ways artists can fail that call. I turn to poetry for these kinds of questions because then the words can make meaning in so many ways, including through their very sound and work that an image can do. There are ways that I see argument failing us, I don’t know if argument is the tool I’m after. But it’s present everywhere in language as we use it and poetry is such a fascinating way to play with that.
SB: In a lot of poems, but particularly in “Saint Hyacinth Basilica,” you explore godhood parallelly with girlhood. I am thinking of the line, “Girl or woman, holy only/ what’s done to me.” How do you create this altar of girlhood– physically, spiritually? Has your experience and embodiment of girlhood changed over the course of composing these poems, and if so, how?
PH: Writing the book was a way to reckon with my vexed relationship to girlhood, to womanness, the scripts imposed upon me. Growing up Catholic, the daughter of Polish immigrants, I struggled with inherited ideas around attractiveness and how to perform as a woman, which was culturally influenced by my upbringing. It’s an ongoing thing that poetry has allowed me to explode open. It’s connected to my questions of beauty and my draw toward beauty, my thoughts around kinship, around reaching toward other immigrant daughters, as in this book and in my life, the core beauty that friendship is, the nourishment that friendship is, all of it entangled with girlhood. Writing the book allowed me to, through poems, open up that question and hold contradiction within it. My experience of gender is full of contradictions– as a queer person, as a person who wants to refuse certain scripts while also frankly loving to feel beautiful and attractive and having a vain streak that I love to not shame myself for, while simultaneously interrogating. There’s this maximalism in the book you mentioned earlier, this love of color, flowers, beautiful things, this desire to not put down the playful, flirtatious, luscious parts of me that are often diminished and associated with girlhood in these flippant ways that, as you alluded to earlier, are somehow seen as separate from serious literature.
I want to embrace pleasure and play and beauty as vital parts of our lives. I love that you said “the altar of girlhood.” There’s something I want to lift up and have reverence for about girlhood. There’s also something I want to smash on that altar. In the emotional arc of the book, there’s a messiness that the speaker allows herself by the end. Where I’ve landed is that it’s an ongoingness for me in the years to come to grapple with the restrictions of my gender and everything that I’m interested in beyond those inherited scripts.
SB: Thank you. Talking about immigrant daughters, I wanted to talk a little about hunger. In a lot of ways, for me, this book is about hunger or wanting more. And the want is for music, truth, language, friendship, landscapes, things that are usually not equated with having utilitarian value. As an immigrant myself, I am very afraid to ask for those things even though I know that I want and deserve more. How do you fulfill (or aim to fulfill) all these hungers beyond the collection, beyond capitalism?
PH: Writing was the space where I allowed myself, or began to allow myself to do that. As you point out, for so many of us, particularly daughters of immigrants, there’s so much shame around wanting more, because so much has been sacrificed in order for us to have what we do. It’s true of many stories I hear, but I’ll speak of my own: my parents sacrificed so much, I have so much more in so many ways than they ever had, how dare I want more? Wanting seems juxtaposed to gratitude, or in tension with gratitude, and I don’t think so. I want to be careful about this because using words like “abundance;” questions of abundance and wellbeing can be very myopic and consumerist. I’m not interested in that. I’m not interested in the thinking that denies pain and ache. But allowing myself to be expressive on the page about wanting, hunger, desire, allowed me to see more fully everything that is and everything I am grateful for and want to continue experiencing.
It’s not just about a lack. It’s about being present with and romancing all that is. That’s the instructive part off of the page in the times when I get stressed about material conditions and the lack, whereas I can be hungry for what I have. Also, refusing the idea that we have to live like this, refusing that the love and joy we might be after can’t be plentiful, feels important to me as a writer, and as a person in my relationships, to practice. I think pleasure, wanting, hunger are crucial to being an artist and a person.We’ve either been told we have to refuse this because then we’re ungrateful and selfish, or indulge in very consumerist ways, and I think there’s a secret third way.
SB: In “Holding Ground,” you write, “I’m obsessed with gerunds, their ongoingness.” Talk to us about your relationship with revision. What are some revelations that the process of revision has offered to you?
PH: Revision feels like that place of merging rigor and play. I allow myself to put a poem, for example, in many different shapes, to reconsider where it ends or begins. It’s both playful and rigorous. The more I am patient with that process – not thinking about the exterior timeline of publishing pressures we may feel or the afterglow feeling of having written– I can extend that experience and trust that playing with the work is not going to extinguish any fire. In fact, it’s going to let it burn in a more lasting way.
Sometimes writers harbor this idea that you want to catch the inspiration and that by revising you’re somehow compromising that experience. Maybe that’s true for some people. For me, the heart of the thing is so alive I don’t believe I’m going to kill it by allowing it to take on different shapes. You can also always return to the initial version. That’s the beauty of this too, there’s so many methods, whether it’s printing out and cutting up and physically moving the text around, or digitally engaging with it where we get to preserve many different versions. That in itself is magical to look back at. These days, I try to keep all the versions and allow that map of the journey of the poem to be a part of it too.
There’s a software and literary journal called Midst I encourage people to check out. There you can glimpse the magic of the playing, the sculpting of the work and for me that’s so intoxicating. Not just the moment of the initial impulse to write but then to stay with it to see where it goes. To surprise yourself. I can’t turn to a poem with an argument I want to make and leave it there. I want to be surprised in the process of writing and to have questions about my own work. I don’t approach it with the methodical “I’m going to write about X, Y, Z” way because poems are unruly, and I love their unruliness. And then in the revision, I get to collaborate with that unruliness.
SB: You once said in an interview, “if we’re lucky, the poems write us” so, yes, there is a kind of reverence towards that. As a follow up, would you be open to sharing about the editorial and revision process working with Tin House?
PH: I loved working with my editor, Alyssa Ogi at Tin House. She’s amazing. She knew to give me a lot of space, but also to be there as a support and offer simultaneously spacious and precise feedback. It wasn’t an extensive amount of feedback so much as the time that I wanted to keep working and the trust she had for the project to evolve from when they’d accepted it for publication. Tin House gave me the option to have the book come out in Fall-Winter 2024 or Winter-Spring 2025. I chose the latter option. I suspected that not only was I going to keep deeply revising because I’m obsessed with revision, but also that maybe new poems would surface and sure enough they did.
Alyssa encouraged me to continue writing the “Letter to Another Immigrant Daughter” series which was, at the time of accepting the book, present but needing some more work. I wanted to give it that time and it felt so good to be seen in that effort. I could have a whole separate project that is just full of many letters to other immigrant daughters and that could be a lifelong exchange. My exchange with Sarah (Ghazal Ali) continues to this day. The way that Alyssa was able to hold and see the expansiveness of so many parts of the book was everything I needed as a writer, to be given that freedom, space, and trust that this was going to expand beyond what was initially submitted. In the process, my title changed from Anchor Baby to We Contain Landscapes. That nudge to do so, which I’d already been mulling over, ended up being very aligned. The original title, Anchor Baby, was becoming too limiting, more fitting for a project that this book wasn’t. The idea of a neat “project” in general didn’t suit the book. I returned to this title from a micro chapbook from a long time ago, We Contain Landscapes, and I saw that it was all part of the same book. My main collaboration was with time. Sometimes, in the urge and pressure to publish, we can get so eager to get a book out that we forget that the poems might just need a little more time.
SB: What happened after the book? What was hard about returning to the page, if it was hard at all? What are some directions you found or continue to find yourself venturing toward?
PH: When the book came out, I found myself in beautiful conversations like this one and suddenly having to speak to things that poetry was the place I went to unpack. I had to form coherent sentences about questions and ideas that are lifelong for me and that the book attempts to wrestle with. I, on one hand, love conversation, especially getting to chat with other immigrant writers, and I’m honored for every interview and engagement with the book. But the public-facing part of a writing life is separate from the writing and making. That’s been challenging because it takes a lot of energy to share the book in that way. I get a lot out of the connections and the conversations that happen but I need to also preserve space for the making.
I’ve struggled amidst other life commitments and the realities of putting bread on the table, material challenges. I’ve struggled to make enough time for my own writing for the next books. I’m still learning how to juggle that aspect of what it means to be in public and what I want to do with that. All this comes back to your rich question about argument and morality that I want to think through more, because the question of what is the role of the writer, the poet in these times is a worthwhile one. I’m not necessarily trying to be a spokesperson. I’m a writer. I’m thinking through right now, how do I create the containers, the rituals, the space for the next books and for supporting other writers in their books and for the art I want to make? How do I make and not think too much about being in public while I process and preserve that space?
A lot of writers find that challenging after their first book, it’s not a unique struggle to figure out how to deal with this. Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about embodied exercises and experimentations. I’ve been trying to approach the actual making of the work in new ways for poetry. I’m also writing more prose and giving myself the space for those projects. Moving through different strategies physically as well as cross-genre experimentation have been really rich. Considering humor and other things that are quite different from my approaches to the first book have been opening up writing for me, but in a very messy way where now I have no idea what’s going to happen next with these coming books. But there area couple books in progress at the same time and I’m feeling excited about that.
◆
Patrons got it first! Consider becoming a monthly supporter of our Patreon. All donations are tax-deductible.
