A Review of Patrycja Humienik’s We Contain Landscapes (Tin House, 2025) – By Vikki C.

Patrycja Humienik’s debut collection We Contain Landscapes (Tin House, 2025) is a work of mesmerising detail and passion for the ever changing terrain of belonging. In the constant remaking of identity, we trace histories of immigration, love and displacement, encountering the climatic sensibilities of natural landscapes which are innately one with our interior.

Humienik deploys letters and other unique forms including her original “Cradle” form illustrated by the poem ‘Magnolia’ to converse with lovers and immigrant daughters bound intergenerationally with a longing for the untameable "heartland". 

Whilst leveraging emotional distance, these poems remain attentive to proximities both organic and surreal. The poet navigates alternate paths to self-love that challenge conventional citizenship: kinship with horses, affinities with “names of plants that please” and a flowing dialogue with water and Earth’s circadian rhythms.

Dreaming towards potential, the poet’s gaze is framed by the rush of landscapes through train windows and a “mode of conveyance” devoted to crossing boundaries of form and knowing. In witnessing, we are subject to a different timescale, communing where passing scenes are both protracted and stolen at once:

                    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 [23-24].

It is cinematics like this that sweep the reader’s conscience leaving us altered, awakened on the other side of revolution itself. The startling motifs of trains and constant motion reminiscent of Nabokov, converge with the surreal timelapse of Tarkovsky, placing us in a breathtaking liminality.

“Migration is the story of longing

           is the story. To risk

rupture for rapture.”

Humienik’s vibrant voice is one of embodied truth, evoking the transformative nature of memory and the multitudes we contain. In travelling these landscapes, we are rewarded cathartically — with a profound love for the “other” we will become.  

We Contain Landscapes is published by Tin House and is available on Amazon.