If I, Must I, Tell The Truth: Review of We Contain Landscapes by Patrycja Humienik

We Contain Landscapes by Patrycja Humienik. Tin House (March 18, 2025). 96 pages. $16.95

For being a debut poetry collection, We Contain Landscapes is a self-assured book that creates a tightly wound, yet expansive movement that breathes life into language with striking imagery and haunting explorations of generational wounds. As Humienik moves through questions of identity, desire, longing, migration, family, history, love, devotion, and belonging in her evocative, lyrical poems, the influence of poets with a distinct, peculiar music and startling use of image like Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Aria Aber, and Ocean Vuong permeates every page.

Humienik’s voice is propelled by a tender strangeness and desire, comfortable digging for meaning in the unfamiliar spaces of collective identity and selfhood.

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Humienik, daughter of Polish immigrants, invites us into the book with a letter. Addressing her readers, she hopes We Contain Landscapes “offers a journey into [your] own more precise questions.” If you’re looking for tidy poems with clear-cut answers, look elsewhere. If you’re willing to share a haunted, grief-stricken, sticky journey with more questions than answers, then stay a bit longer.

Right from its first poem, “An Anchor is an Argument,” we are directed into a non-linear experience driven by absence, by the tension between what is nameable and what is not, by what cannot be defined outside of opacity. “I play with feeling, / but I can never remember the

ending.” (I) Yet, even if language falls short, the body is brimming with meaning, with history, with “the finest of a thousand lies,” (8) and it becomes Humienik’s main vessel to traverse the multiplicity of her sense-making terrains. A dancer and movement instructor, Humienik is well-versed in the wealth of registers, of evidence in the body as a living archive.

We are situated in the desires of the landscape of the body (“Do to me what sunlight does to a river” [7]) as we move towards the fraught landscape of religious and familial—and, of course, political—devotion:

(…) But

when devotion is self-betrayal, what then?

//

When devotion is self-betrayal,

the body knows. (13)

My father calls me his American dream A good daughter is a secret keeper

I suppose I am to live like a kind of evidence (16)

(…) lit a candle

for my mother’s parents who I never met    I had questions for God        do you renounce imperialism? (26)

After being introduced to the fraught relationship of the speaker to sensuality and devoutness, the book moves towards even stranger, haunting spaces. We are hard-launched into the main questions of the book: how to live as an immigrant daughter? What to do with the memory inscribed in my flesh, in my thoughts, in my language? How to live with this absence, this animal longing for that which I want to claim as mine, which may not exist anymore? How to let go of what doesn’t serve me? Humienik moves us through the past and present and what exists in between, with strong lyricism and imagery. The landscapes start to meld and conflate with each other, a voracious yet tender terrain (“What is the softest thing / you’ve ever held hostage?” [48]), wounded yet trying to heal on their own terms (“You know how. I want to live. Like an animal.” [56]) and with a sure-footed step into the unknown (“It wasn’t just that I knew the names of body parts—I spoke to them. / I said things I can’t explain” [70]). The journey is troubled, and the end is nowhere near in sight, but Humienik understands that it is essential to keep moving, to keep trying and failing and trying again:

A horse knows when you don’t know

Where your own two feet are

Picture us running

So fast my mind could quiet (35)

As the collection builds, a collective consciousness emerges, something akin to a fleet of ships; not of the large, grand kind, no; of small, bright boats coming from all directions, reuniting, stronger together in the intensity and immensity of longing and grief; of wanting to commune with those who understand this complexity (“I hope I’m laughing when I fall. / I want to send that laughter to you.” [61]). There are engagements with other immigrant daughters in the series, “Letter to Another Immigrant Daughter,” as well as with beloveds, other writers and artists (like Szymborska, Björk, and Diana Al-Hadid), past selves and landscapes across the world, and with time, its many undefinable faces (“Do I belong to the hours? // Questions huddle before the hunt.” [88]).

These poems, shifting in form (including a crown of sonnets and a concrete poem) and storytelling techniques, are anchored by Humienik’s evocative yet restrained lyric. In their short flutters of language, these poems create rich, diverse geographies. They are unafraid to meld seemingly different topics, to proceed through leaps of wonder to unexpected landings. This doesn’t mean the poems are unorganized, cluttered, or too abstract. We are journeying through atlases of longing, desire, devotion, grief; there will be messy parts and stops in unnamable, uncharted places. There were poems whose lines could be read in any order with haunting effect (like “Figuration” and “No Common Language”); withholding moments that pushed me to immerse myself in Humienik’s fraught map-making (“You didn’t ask me to live on like this. I’m asking you” [55]); unexpected images that renewed my appreciation of the capacious nature of poetry when speaking on what is difficult to name (I slip into bed, head full of tulips.” [52]).

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“Discomfort is a sacred site,” Humienik writes in the long poem “On Belonging” (85). We are propelled through the disquiet of confronting old wounds to properly heal this time. As Humienik buries the anchor in the penultimate poem (91) to embrace the lifelong journey to becoming, they close the book as they began it: with a letter. This time, it is addressed to a beloved, asking them to “[not] keep your grief from me.” (95) Reminding us that this book is built to navigate us, together, into growth, into departure from what harms us.

“Touch is a pilgrimage you make inside yourself.” (72) Humienik invites us to dive in with her and see what we can find in the most mysterious, hurt parts of ourselves. To wander in our thorned bodies and untie what holds us captive to pain. To trust that there is a path to freedom that starts in ourselves and ends with our beloveds.

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For a book immersed in personal and collective liberation, its restraint on form felt sometimes out of place, like exerting control over that which is, ultimately, uncontainable. But once I finished the collection, I understood Humienik’s approach to craft. Like other lyrically-driven poets engaging with intricate questions about time, inheritance, violence, and desire (such as Aracelis Girmay and Eduardo C. Corral), it is through a consistent approach to craft—to center the lyric’s revealing, mystical language within contained, approachable forms—that the book gains its cohesive, grounding tone. Without it, We Contain Landscapes wouldn’t feel as welcoming to all kinds of readers, communities, future beloveds. As open to the particular hope that flourishes from knowing each other; from moving slowly, devoutly towards what is on the other side of communion with the self and the world it exists in (“I think the future wants something from me.” [63]).

Deftly moving through questions that have haunted many immigrant families before hers and will continue to haunt for generations to come, We Contain Landscapes is a multi-dimensional mirror through which we see Humienik confront hard-earned truths, wrestle with inherited and self-imposed borders in the body, and begin to break free from long-held expectations and beliefs. This debut is unafraid to confront the complex, obsessive interior in the search of personal freedom as an important step toward new communal understandings of identity, relation, and care.

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“[T]his is a book full of questions,” Humienik tells us in the opening letter of the book. We Contain Landscapes’ penultimate poem, “Bury the Anchor,” is after Bhanu Kapil’s twelve questions in her seminal book The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers. This inspired me to make a list of twelve questions from We Contain Landscapes. I share it hoping it sparks something strange, fraught, bright in us.

Where do we go to find the myths that made us? (81)

I come from a people who weren’t colonizers, / but did they want to be? (68)

What is the softest thing you’ve ever held hostage? (48)

Is it chaos, or the order of things? (56)

Who did you blame? (48)

is we a home? (42)

Can a river unwound? (30)

what if protection is a form of harm? (26)

When have you let yourself go off the rails? (23)

Do we choose the questions / our lives ask? (83)

Do we belong to ghosts / or do ghosts belong to us? (89)

O tenderness, I am walking toward you. / Why are you pulling away? (38)