In 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 Kuczynska. As Kuczynska'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?

Kuczynska'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.

About the Author
Zosia Kuczynska is the author of two pamphlets with The Emma Press: Pisanki (2017) and With others in your absence (2021). Her work is featured in Queering the Green: Post-2000 Queer Irish Poetry (Lifeboat, 2021) and has appeared in The White Review, Poetry Ireland Review, and The Tangerine. Rachel Piercey is a poet and editor who also writes for children. Her poems have appeared in magazines including Magma, The Rialto, Poems In Which, Butcher's Dog and The Poetry Review and she has two pamphlets with the Emma Press, The Flower and the Plough and Rivers Wanted. https://www.rachelpierceypoet.com/

Reviews

'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. Kuczynska 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 Stas", "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



Book Information
ISBN 9781910139721
Author Zosia Kuczynska
Format Paperback
Page Count 36
Imprint The Emma Press
Publisher The Emma Press
Weight(grams) 65g