We Contain Landscapes: Patrycja Humienik (Wisconsin Book Festival) | Arts + Literature Laboratory | Madison Contemporary Arts Center

We Contain Landscapes: Patrycja Humienik (Wisconsin Book Festival)

Arts + Literature Laboratory welcomes the 2025 Wisconsin Book Festival for four poetry events on Saturday, October 25, 2025. You can find a complete schedule of events at the Wisconsin Book Festival website.

Patrycja Humienik will read from her debut poetry collection, We Contain Landscapes, at the third program of the day at 6:00pm.

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.

Photo of author wearing black and green, crouching in front of a green backdrop of foliage

Patrycja Humienik, daughter of Polish immigrants, is a writer, editor, and performance artist. She has developed writing + movement workshops for the Henry Art Gallery, Arts+Literature Laboratory, Northwest Film Forum, in prisons, and elsewhere. An MFA candidate at UW-Madison, she serves as Events Director for The Seventh Wave, where she is also an editor for the Community Anthologies project. Patrycja grew up in Evanston, Illinois, and lives in Madison, Wisconsin. She is the author of We Contain Landscapes, out from Tin House in March 2025.

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Arts + Literature Laboratory is located at 111 S. Livingston Street #100, Madison, Wisconsin, 53703.

Our galleries are open Tuesday through Friday 10am-5pm and Saturday noon to 5pm, and other programs take place throughout the week. Please check the events calendar and education section for details.

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