Woman : Plant : Language

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 Masłowska’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. Masłowska’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.