Branches of a House

"From a Conradian vantage point on the banks of the Thames to Lodz's Piotrkowska Ulicia, the longest street in Europe, Agnieszka Studzinska calibrates her seeing on history's ruins making their way into the private intimacies of home and the unhomely. The architecture of fragments - of bones, of the conversations with grandmothers, husbands, children, and the overheard violences of strangers - takes up Blanchot's call to unwork silence, to arrive at a new language. Stunningly deft and formally alive, these poems at every turn metamorphose a self to deliver, unforgettably, on that very promise of newness." -Sandeep Parmar "The measurements of existing from the inside, given through the concentrated, elegant details of the outside - this is a book of memory, of record, of heightened perception, in poetry. It's a remarkable, measured, generous collection, driven by an awareness and insight that reaches past the language of the outer world into a confrontation with something permanent and transitory. In this paradox is the brilliance." -SJ Fowler "Agnieszka Studzinska's Branches of a House is a poetic exploration of dwelling that becomes a hauntology of lost family, lost country, lost language. Its mitochondrial tracing of generations - grandparents, parents, children - evokes the traumatic shadow of the past: not just an emigre's return to the familiar Polish landscape of 'wetlands and fields' and silver birches; but also the sense of 'ghost houses in every village' - the product of war, holocaust, diaspora and the passage of time. The ghosts, shadows and absences are counter-balanced by an embodied poetics, tracking the body in time and through time - as child, woman, lover, wife, mother - with an attention to colours, tastes, smells, atmospheres, silences. The making and unmaking of home, in a poetry of continuing formal inventiveness and considerable emotional and linguistic delicacy, also involves a reaching out to other 'unfinished separations' and 'migratory configurations', historical and contemporary, in this impressively sustained sequence of poems." -Robert Hampson