House of Wandering by Lucyna Prostko

Lucyna Prostko’s House of Wandering inflects the speaker’s physical nostos and investigates poetry’s refractive and mutable selves, its many personas fashioned and re-imagined over time. Keyed into mystery and anchored in compassion, Prostko’s collection is deeply concerned with questions of perception, with the heightened attention of a child lessoned in the silences and evasions of WWII and Marxist-Leninist Poland. House of Wandering dazzles in its fearless reckoning with collective trauma, with immigration, with visible and invisible domains, and with the kin and community that people the speaker’s world. Stunning in its wide-eyed intelligence, Prostko’s collection turns its attention to the unknown, to interiorities within interiorities, and to the hidden and overlooked, such as “the cellar…  the underbelly of the house, [where] in its moist cavern a toad/ sits on a secret pearl – glistening/ like an un-shelled egg, almost transparent –/I can make out random shapes,/ as if in a kaleidoscope, but no visible principle.”
 —Sarah Giragosian, author of Queer Fish, The Death Spiral, and Mother Octopus

“And what you find – is always a threshold,” says Lucyna Prostko, summing up the peculiar magic of her poems.  For she is preeminently a poet of liminality, of borders crossed, recrossed, dissolved – past and present, living and dead, Poland and America, material and spiritual.  No poet captures better the porousness of lived experience, how the most concrete, physical sensations – the smell of drying tobacco in a barn in Poland, the white feather of a plucked goose caught in a wrinkle of her mother’s face – open to luminous realms of memory and spirit, beautiful and terrifying, where “Even the most radiant / things collapse into a black hole, / into the very atoms of loss, vibrating / like bees around a mildewed stump.”  Across these borders she passes and repasses effortlessly – a double agent, loyal to all – conjuring figures of lonely old men stirring jam in their tea, generations of clear-eyed women struggling against hardship and menace – each infused with a pulsing life and a dignity that is beautiful, profound, and heartbreaking.  “All I have is this sturdy cage / of my bones and skin – / to hold me in place,” she confronts us with the precariousness of our lives, our knowledge, and our identity: “Be aware, beware, be wary of time.”
–Lance Le Grys, author of Views from an Outbuilding (Clare Songbirds Publishing House, 2019)