House of Wandering by Lucyna Prostko

House of Wandering engages narratives of identity at the intersection of history and culture. It is haunted by the idea of home that exists only within the space of memory and imagination and reflects the divided identities of an immigrant self. This book is a tribute to the poets’ origins in northeastern Poland, exploring both the magic of the storytelling and the scars of trauma; it is also a contemplation of nostalgia, loss, and hope that relate to the idea of home – this shifting, ghostly concept of belonging that the speaker must face in the new world. #poetry #memory #immigration #loss #humanity

Lucyna Prostko was born in Poland and came to New York City at the age of 19. She received her M.F.A. in Creative Writing at New York University, where she was awarded the New York Times Fellowship, and her PhD in English from the University at Albany. Her poetry has appeared in various journals, anthologies, and online publications, including Washington Square, Quiddity, Ellipsis, Salamander, Cutthroat, Nimrod, Poets.org and Five Points. She was a Semi-Finalist of “Discovery” The Nation poetry contest and a Cutthroat Discovery Poet (2009). Her first collection of poems Infinite Beginnings was a winner of the Bright Hill Press poetry book competition. She lives with her husband and their beloved animals in Upstate New York. She has been teaching English and creative writing for over 20 years.

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)