Woman : Plant : Language

A dazzling debut that plays on the borders of language, landscape and life in all its forms.

I will not die
for any monolithic country 
playing its anthem to the dead

Time is my country,
it counts my inhalations,
a merciless teacher untying my hair 

Part lullaby, part insurrection, Agata Maslowska’s dazzling poetry is powered by the drive to understand life at its deepest level, pre-human and beyond borders. To explode language, grasping what we can know in our bones and roots, and to live according to that knowing. Lyrically sublime, playfully provocative, the poems in Woman : Plant : Language disrupt form to challenge rampant authority, layering the lived experiences of womanhood, migration and war between the ripple of bryophytes, the songs of the soil, the fading call of endangered species. Maslowska’s work is myceliumesque, linking arms with Etel Adnan, Jane Hirshfield, Nan Shepherd, Anna Tsing and more, to flourish within a crystalline network of thinkers. An unforgettable debut, calling us back to the unspeakable world.

“Astounding: powerfully fragile, strongly precarious, harmoniously raging, ultimately tender. Speculative stories are hinted at, in a voice so musical that we would follow it anywhere. It takes us into the garden, to a lighthouse, through nuclear holocaust. Poems probe the thick facts of plant life (figs, wasps, pollen), and our human entanglement. Ordered to flourish in a 'hostile environment', this poet peels apart our perverse systems. A personal heritage of European war, migration, and music translates into lullaby and confrontation. There is a forest of allusions—Jane Hirshfield and Etel Adnan, among others—including an Edwin Morgan-esque sonic nonsense investigation that sounds the soil of the seabed, and of a nuclear plant. A book in the best traditions of yearning, warning, mischief, and hope.” Anthony Vahni Capildeo

“Woman : Plant : Language by Agata Maslowska finds uncanny intersections between the things that continue to grow in these fallow end times. Viewing the world from the soil up, these poems are deeply attuned to the movements of nature, people and ideas—from the fruitful and fricative collisions of new and old languages, to the legacy of European war and displacement. Musical, allusive, and always formally subversive, these are poems of precise philosophical enquiry that make the reader see this tired old world afresh.” Jessica Traynor 

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