In-Person: We Contain Landscapes by Patrycja Humienik

Join us at Women & Children First on Friday, March 21 to celebrate the poetry collection by Patrycja Humienik, who will be joined by Sarah Ghazal Ali.

Please note: This event is free to attend, but registration is requested. Masks are required for our in-person events.

To whom do we belong, and at what cost? Patrycja Humienik’s debut poetry collection, We Contain Landscapes, is haunted by questions of desire, borders, and the illusion of national belonging. Bringing music and rich sensory detail to the page, these poems attend to the inextricable link between our bodies and the land. Over six ruminative and lush sections, they survey place and memory, both intergenerationally and through emotional bonds with other immigrant daughters.

Weaving in letters, innovative forms, and meditations on devotion, sexuality, and self-deceit, We Contain Landscapes introduces a speaker who “will not turn away from the ache of this world.” For every reader who also harbors a voracious longing to encounter infinite landscapes and ways of being, this incisive collection dreams toward a more expansive idea of kinship—of becoming beloved to one another and ourselves.

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 Daily, Poetry Society of America, the Slowdown show, and elsewhere.

Sarah Ghazal Ali is the author of (Alice James Books, 2024), winner of the GLCA New Writers Award and a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Her work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, the Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day series, and elsewhere. A Stadler and Kundiman Fellow, Sarah is the poetry editor for West Branch and an Assistant Professor of English at Macalester College.

Accessibility: This event is hosted at the bookstore, which is a wheelchair accessible space. Masks are required. Seating is on a first-come, first-serve basis. To request ASL interpretation for this event, please email [email protected] by no later than 14 days before the event. For other questions or access needs, please email [email protected].

Host or Publisher Women & Children First