Book Review

In We Contain Landscapes (Tin House, 2025), Patrycja Humienik journeys through memory—personal and communal—reflecting on faith, imperialism, desire, and borders. As a European immigrant to the United States, I was drawn in by the collection’s title for how it highlights multiplicity within a person, and how that fullness is a shared experience by a collective “we.”

Born to Polish immigrants, Humienik reflects on her country’s history and all she has inherited from her ancestors. She does not, however, take on this work alone; a series of epistolary poems spaced throughout the collection highlights the strength of connection and offers Humienik’s speaker a safe space to ask challenging questions about belonging and home. Each poem is titled “Letter to Another Immigrant Daughter,” though the speaker addresses different, specific individuals. To Itola, she contemplates the push and pull of hope and fear, desiring to escape the ache that comes from living on the precipice of two worlds. Humienik writes:

Let landscapes

skip rocks across our faces

pressed up against the glass. Tell me a story.

Tell me everything. Your laugh widens the gaze.

If the trees watch us in one flicker they see

where breath is held.

I’m not sure a daughter can ever be grateful enough.

Some days I am thankless.

Fogging up the window drawing hearts.

For Humienik, traversing a cliffside via train materializes the liminality of the immigrant’s home, and the difficulty to ever, truly, settle somewhere. Coastlines are a natural embodiment of a marginalization, a transition between two types of homes. We Contain Landscapes is welcomed into a host of literature written by queer and othered poets, folks who are too often told that they are not ‘natural’ or don’t belong and yet continue to embrace how they are reflected without question in the earth we all share. In the lines above, the speaker also addresses gendered expectations that further compound her experience, doubting ever being able to meet them and feeling safe enough to admit that reality to Itola. The ending image of a lovestruck or desiring immigrant daughter is also a vulnerability, a truth that paints a larger picture about wanting more from life.

We Contain Landscapes weaves reflections on desire through multiple lenses. “On Devotion,” for example, asks questions on love and relationships in conversation with imperialism, faith, and lineage. Humienik masterfully balances these broad themes with specificity and personal confession. Readers are shown “mumbled prayers in Polish” and a “lover shoveling / flake after flake out of [her] mouth and into the slush pile”; such intimate details texture and ground Humienik’s poetry. She also notes how it is “Easy to confuse habit with ritual, / ritual with devotion, devotion with desire.” Introspective confessions draw readers in, inviting them to ponder and posit their own answers to life’s biggest questions.

Another poem that illustrates a courageous relationship to one’s own desire is “Voracious,” placed around the middle of the collection. Humienik’s gorgeous imagery shines amongst lines of equally poignant self-reflection: “I slip into bed, head full of tulips. / If devotion is measured / in repetition, I’m inconsistent at best . . . Sometimes I pray / before meals, more often forget, spitting out / little bones from the same mouth I kiss my lover with.” The admittance to what is forgotten, what is not done, is a recognition of change and agency more than guilt or failure. Seeking fullness, Humienik understands the organic rhythms of life, how inconsistency is not unbeautiful. Much of religion is ritual—Catholicism in particular asks rigidity of its congregation in terms of how to worship and how to get into heaven. Much of sexuality is fluid and blooming. And so, finding a path toward fitting all of this in one person’s way of being is deeply personal.

This collection is in many respects a reckoning of religion—of what it offers, how it is structured, and what participation in it means across generations and across landscapes. Raised Catholic, I remember attending mass every Sunday in a massive, marble building with icons, large doors, and ornate stained glass windows. Listening to scripture and song was how I was taught to be a kind person, and yet worship based in teachings on sin and punishment in large part prevented me from knowing my true self as a queer woman. Though some sites of spiritual significance are passed down, for Humienik, sacred spaces are created. For example, she recalls a trip to Poland in “Salt of the Earth,” a title with Biblical reference (Matthew 5:13): “At 22, running up a blur of pines, beyond my uncle’s turkeys and geese, to where / my mama grew up picking blueberries, I planted a little tree. Where I’m invited / to return.” Here, the connection to the land, to family history, and to spirit is a choice, and a commitment to growth and self-acceptance.

“We” is only poem in the collection with an expansive visual presentation on the page. Words and phrases are clustered with extensive white space in between, representing how a collective “we” exists as smaller groups and individuals across the world. Considering how language brings people together, Humienik’s speaker asks,

when i learn a language not spoken in my family

am i trying to expand the we?

we is my   in Polish         the y softer

not possession: it’s not mine

to belong to: be longed for                             is we                a longing

Learning non-native languages, such as those spoken by loved ones, new neighbors, and respected poets, is an acknowledgement of borders while simultaneously an insistence of disregarding them.

Even if the exact details aren’t mine, I am grateful for We Contain Landscapes as a model toward self-acceptance. Humienik’s writing beautifully documents the personal while connecting to her communities in both honest and determined ways. This collection encourages readers to reach toward the dreaminess of a world where we can love ourselves and be loved by our people, no matter how far.