Published 2021. Paperback, 80pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848617773 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

Branches of a House, Agnieszka Studzińska’s third collection, encounters the hauntings of dislocation and home. The odd, unfixed status of assumed reality of immediate and distant circumstances is acknowledged in obscured, absent houses and in the boundaries of dwelling. The poems are built from the gaps in remembering, and form a longing to find, in Gaston Bachelard’ s words, ‘our corner of the world.’ They demand yet distill in their archeology, the question of how we inhabit lived and broken spaces. Always on the threshold of loss, these poems move between the lyrical, personal, historical, and abstract, and meditate on the fractured utterance of thinking.

"From a Conradian vantage point on the banks of the Thames to Lodz's Piotrkowska Ulicia, the longest street in Europe, Agnieszka Studzińska calibrates her seeing on history’s ruins making their way into the private intimacies of home and the unhomely. The architecture of fragments—of bones, of the conversations with grandmothers, husbands, children, and the overheard violences of strangers—takes up Blanchot’s call to unwork silence, to arrive at a new language. Stunningly deft and formally alive, these poems at every turn metamorphose a self to deliver, unforgettably, on that very promise of newness." — Sandeep Parmar

"The measurements of existing from the inside, given through the concentrated, elegant details of the outside -this is a book of memory, of record, of heightened perception, in poetry. It's a remarkable, measured, generous collection, driven by an awareness and insight that reaches past the language of the outer world into a confrontation with something permanent and transitory. In this paradox is the brilliance." —SJ Fowler

"Agnieszka Studzińska’s Branches of a House is a poetic exploration of dwelling that becomes a hauntology of lost family, lost country, lost language. Its mitochondrial tracing of generations – grandparents, parents, children – evokes the traumatic shadow of the past: not just an émigré’s return to the familiar Polish landscape of ‘wetlands and fields’ and silver birches; but also the sense of ‘ghost houses in every village’ – the product of war, holocaust, diaspora and the passage of time. The ghosts, shadows and absences are counter-balanced by an embodied poetics, tracking the body in time and through time - as child, woman, lover, wife, mother – with an attention to colours, tastes, smells, atmospheres, silences. The making and unmaking of home, in a poetry of continuing formal inventiveness and considerable emotional and linguistic delicacy, also involves a reaching out to other ‘unfinished separations’ and ‘migratory configurations’, historical and contemporary, in this impressively sustained sequence of poems." —Robert Hampson

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