Description
Book SynopsisIn 1940, a young girl is taken from her home in Eastern Poland to Arkhangelsk, Siberia; in 1942, she boards a train. Seventy years later, that journey is reimagined by her granddaughter, Zosia Kuczyńska. As Kuczyńska’s poems tell the story of her babcia, her maternal grandmother, coming to England, she confronts some of the big questions of art and history: how do you tell another person’s story without exploiting it? What’s at stake when we try make patterns out of the past, and can we ever leave those patterns behind?
Kuczyńska’s poems are both richly narrative and sharply attentive to the complexities of home and culture. They capture human endurance through the redrawing of political maps, from ‘the heat of Easter in Tehran’ to the powdered eggs and stocking shortages of the London Blitz.
Trade Review'Kuczynska narrates a bond between generations, one that has led her to depict the pear trees and “metal-sown” fields of her grandmother’s memories. Pisanki is a spellbinding tapestry of images and emotions, of displacement, loss and hope.'
- PBS Bulletin
"Like “Sarah Jane’s Geranium”, almost all the poems in this selection ironize the conventions of such sentiments in order to better perceive the real political effects of displacement. Kuczyńska seeks to recognize and refigure this ‘longing’ for home in the pamphlet as a whole, but this impulse is most obviously present as she writes the history of her grandmother’s deportation to Maharashtra in India, and eventual emigration to England. These poems – “Brother Staś”, “The train from Arkhangelsk to Bukhara” and “Dresses”, among others – are the pamphlet’s most obvious strength, and will be the reason many readers pick up Pisanki in the first place." -Edward Ferrari, Sabotage Reviews
-- Edward Ferrari
