Patrycja Humienik: On Obsession and Devotion, Being Drawn to Rivers, Celebrating Beloveds, and Her Debut Poetry Collection ‘We Contain Landscapes’
In the poem “Beloved,” Patrycja Humienik writes, “I will not turn away from the ache of this world”. In her debut poetry collection We Contain Landscapes (Tin House, 2025), page by page, she shows readers exactly how these aches are faced, time and time again. Humienik’s debut book, where “Beloved,” appears, “is haunted by questions of desire, borders, and the illusion of national belonging”—it speaks of confession, prayer, place, and longing in a way that produces an ever-present sense of wonder throughout its six sections. It was the last book I read in 2024, and it has stuck with me in innumerable ways since, from its lush pearlescent-like cover to its very last words.
I spoke with Humienik via email about the early seeds of writing We Contain Landscapes, the celebration of the beloved, feeling kinship with fellow immigrant daughters, her fascination with spirals, revering bodies of water, literary inspirations, and more.
Erica Abbott: Congratulations on the release of your debut poetry collection! How did We Contain Landscapes come to be over the years?
Patrycja Humienik: I wrote most of We Contain Landscapes in deep study outside of institutions, writing and revising for years while working a day job. The book emerged from the push and pull of avoiding and gravitating toward my obsessions—reading sharpened my questions and friendship gave me the fortitude to stay with those hauntings. Writing can be terrifying.
I was in a writing group with Gabrielle Bates, Erin Marie Lynch, and Erin L. McCoy for over two years, in which my relationship to revision deepened in both magical and concrete ways. Conversations with other immigrant daughters, some of whom are addressed directly in the book, were also vital, among other brilliant writers and artists I have the luck to be in conversation with on and off the page. I completed final book revisions back in the region of my childhood, where I returned for an MFA at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The writing emerged, too, from forces I struggle to articulate. A restlessness. A need to confront self-deceit and to reach toward places in myself unknown to me.
EA: This collection is brimming with themes of devotion, desire, belonging, longing at the root of it all—can you speak to some of the ways these inhabit the spaces you create in both your poetry and life?
PH: The themes you name are ones I’ll likely mull over for decades to come. I often teach a workshop on poetry and devotion because of my enduring fascination with devotion; I get so much out of the varied responses people have to the idea. I’m still learning and unlearning what that word means to me, in relational and spiritual and artistic terms.
In Portland back in 2019, my first time going to AWP, the writer Corinne Manning was posted up outside of the convention center having one-on-one conversations on the difference between desire and longing. I sat down with them in a delighted daze, relieved to break from the whirl and fluorescent lighting to chat about our shared obsession with those words. I had only published a couple poems, and was returning to my long-held love of poetry. I knew so little about the world of publishing and living writers, a world I was drawn to and intimidated by. I love thinking back on the intensity and depth of that conversation with Corinne on desire and longing—I’m reminded of the spaces we can make on the fringes.
EA: Borders, nationhood, Poland, and the land emerge through various poems as well, especially “Salt of the Earth”, interweaving amongst poems of the body and longing—you note the “inextricable link” that exists in this space. One such way this seems to appear is through this idea of fragments (“No such thing as the world—I touch fragments” and “Go to the lake / Arrange the fragments / Shaping—dreaming—”). I’m wondering if you can say more about this?
PH: The root of the word “fragment” is to break. Sometimes I can only write in fragments. Fragment feels truer to life than the sentence.
EA: Rivers, lakes, and other bodies of water run throughout this collection, whether in the sense of the sensual (“Do to me what sunlight does to a river), or immigration (“The difference between a river and a creek is that / from a creek, no new branches are formed.”), as flooding and shame, in the blood itself and lineage, as the river meets (or is in pursuit of) the sea, or even as reverse elegy. In what ways do these images help shape the book and serve as a throughline for it? How does it speak to and serve you as a poet?
PH: I grew up near Lake Michigan and am fascinated by lake effect, the graveyards of the Great Lakes, and the complexity of those ecosystems. Water has been an inexhaustible source of contemplation, embodiment, and solace for me—the kind that doesn’t deny grief—since childhood. Rivers in particular have a quality that mirrors the poetic image at its best: at once grounding, inextricable from the sensuous material of life, and transporting. River is at once myth and irrigation, transportation and border. What better image for a book wrestling with questions of migration and belonging, devotion and desire, climate grief, time?
I have a reverence for water. I don’t know a truer phrase than the Lakota “Mní wičhóni,” “Water is life,” heard worldwide during the struggle to protect tribal waters at Standing Rock. We cannot forget—despite the relentless insistence on profit over life, the disastrous push for fossil fuel production and generative AI, and the seduction of comfort above all else—that freshwater is a finite resource.
As for my love of the sea—Etel Adnan said it best: “...to look at the sea is to become what one is.”
EA: Time and hauntings are also a key element of this book, particularly its circling/cyclical nature. It often shows up in images of spirals, like stairs, nostalgia itself, or a poem in the shape of a spiral. Lines such as “I swear I’ll stop talking / about the hours we cannot own” or in the opening poem: “Growing up, I despised the metronome, / its insistence on orderly time, the lie.” What role do these elements play, or rather evoke, in the sense of a life where time is seemingly slipping through our fingers, but also perhaps it’s not in a way?
PH: I’m visually and intellectually drawn to spirals. I sometimes visualize my writing process as a spiral staircase. Walking up and down to look at a central idea from a different vantage.
In any given moment, we can be, at once, in touch with the past, present, and future. There are whole industries invested in linear ideas about aging and self-improvement. But thinking and living aren’t linear.
EA: Can you speak a bit about the journey taken in the sonnet crown “Saint Hyacinth Basilica”—that sequence blew me away.
PH: Thank you! If my book has multiple hearts, that sonnet crown is one of them. I remember the power went out one gray afternoon while I was working my day job from home in Seattle. I lit candles and started working on that poem. It was one of those gorgeous moments of feeling utterly possessed. When I get in a state like that, it’s hard to describe or remember what exactly happened. I remember fragments of “Saint Hyacinth Basilica” came from other, failed, poems. I’m not a writer who often approaches the page with a single “about.” I uncover what I’m writing into by writing. Any time I find myself writing into the question of faith—one of my life’s questions—I’m thinking about my relationship to that idea over time, and I’m thinking, too, of time itself, and of inheritance, devotion, desire…
Writing that sonnet crown took me to unexpected places, including to my great-grandmother, who, as I mention in the poem, I never met and have seen no photographs of. Of many questions We Contain Landscapes asks is the question: what joys, fears, dreams were passed down to us?
EA: Something else that is so poignant in this collection is the meditation on immigrant daughters, and the letters to and addressing of the beloveds in your life. You mention this series grew out of an epistolary exchange with a fellow poet. In your letter to the reader at the beginning, when noting that the collection is full of questions, there are ones “[you ask with, and of, other immigrant daughters” even as the book isn’t necessarily meant to provide answers to these questions, but rather “[offering] readers a journey into their own more precise questions.” This celebration of beloveds in your life comes through songs shared, laughter exchanged, shared aches and griefs, selves that aren’t always easily defined or recognized and the ways in which friends help to shed light on these things. What was the process like in writing these and the experience of seeing them on the page like this?
PH: Writing is relational. Even if not in conversation with the living, we are in conversation with the dead. I’m immensely grateful to be in conversation with both.
I’ve shared details elsewhere about the process of the “Letter to Another Immigrant Daughter” series in the book, so I’ll refrain from repeating too much here, but relationships with other immigrant children have been crucial to making this book. Reaching intra-generationally pushed me to articulate questions, longings, that I have been unable to ask intergenerationally. I love that you characterized it as a “celebration of beloveds in your life”! I once heard Yusef Komunyakaa describe poetry as “celebration and confrontation,” which stayed with me.
EA: Who are some of your biggest literary influences? What inspires you and gets to the heart of who you are?
PH: Some of my biggest living literary influences are Aracelis Girmay, Sandra Lim, Anne Carson, Aria Aber, Carl Phillips, and Natalie Diaz. As for writers no longer with us, among many are Wisława Szymborska, Alejandra Pizarnik, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Etel Adnan, Mahmoud Darwish, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Lucie Brock-Broido, Linda Gregg, and James Baldwin. Each of these writers teach me, ongoingly.
Ana Mendieta’s “Silueta” series, Francesca Woodman’s self-portraits, and Etel Adnan’s paintings speak to something core in me. I am deeply inspired by a wide range of visual art, music, dance, film, and, of course, landscapes.
EA: How does your work with The Seventh Wave impact and inform your work as a poet?
PH: One of my favorite experiences with The Seventh Wave, a bicoastal residency and magazine, was curating the “On Rivers” issue for the Community Anthologies project. I also love facilitating virtual and in-person programming. The Seventh Wave is imaginative and relational in their approach, and this is the way I try to move as a poet on and off the page. A lot of literary projects throw around the word “community,” though the word is not always earned. A process-oriented, deeply supportive approach can be rare to encounter in publishing.
EA: Do you have any other projects you’re working on or hope to in the future?
PH: I’m currently working on a novella, and writing poems toward my second collection. I intend to do more editing and curatorial work. I also hope to write more on my relationship with and love of dance.
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Patrycja Humienik, daughter of Polish immigrants, is the author of We Contain Landscapes (Tin House, 2025). An editor and teaching artist, Patrycja has developed writing and movement workshops for the Henry Art Gallery, Arts+Literature Laboratory, The Seventh Wave, Northwest Film Forum, and in prisons. Her work can be found in The New Yorker, Gulf Coast, Poetry Northwest, Poetry Daily, Poetry Society of America, the Slowdown show, and elsewhere.
