The title “Taxonomy” sets up as context the study and classification of beings. Such study presumes authority and ownership over “other” beings, which here includes “ancestors.” The poem repeats images of containment (white cardboard boxes, blue screen, prey in the throat of the predator) and employs discordant juxtapositions (the cormorant, the zoom room, ) to interrogate contemporary society including the settler colonial collecting of Indigenous bodies. It also suggests an alternate “intact” world, the “perhaps” world of the waterbirds, one “without acronyms.”
Kimberly Blaeser on "Taxonomy" |
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"Patrycja Humienik's Powerful Debut Poetry Collection"
"The poems make use of the canon’s go-to imagery—rivers, seas, flowers—while exploring new territory in spiral staircases and 'un-ribboning.' There’s a sensual, ephemeral, dream-like quality to the collection, woven in with lines like, 'Do to me what sunlight does to a river.' They demand extra time to imagine and deserve a moment to bask in. Deep veins of nature running throughout cause a jarring contrast with modern happenings—one moment light filters through leaves and the next we’re scrolling Instagram. Juxtaposition is the name of the game in We Contain Landscapes."
via ASSOCIATED PRESS |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Katey Funderbergh and Nicholas Ritter on Building Community
"This program proves to me, again and again, that poetry is a liberatory force. Prisons shouldn’t exist, but each time I’m in the classroom with our students, I remember that this craft is an avenue for free expression and self-exploration. The poems allow me to connect with the students, to share my own memories, dreams, struggles, and to relate to them about both the content of the poems we read, and the content of the poems they write." |
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