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Agata Puwalska’s fourth collection opens with epigraphs on the complexities of seeing from three diverse thinkers: painter and critic Władysław Strzemiński, the Polish-born mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot who developed the field of ‘fractal geometry’, and American eco-poet Forrest Gander. In her poems, the built world of commerce and art collides with the unpredictability of nature as we can see from such titles as ‘handlarz deszczu’ (‘the purveyor of rain’), ‘muzeum powietrza’ (‘museum of air’), or ‘latarnia z piorunów’ (‘lantern of lightning’).

Critics note that Puwalska builds on earlier generations of Polish avant-garde poets, both the utopic, pre-World War II ones and their more sceptical and negating postwar counterparts. The effect is a decentring of the human, or as Puwalska says in one poem: ‘the backdrop becomes the hero’. This method has an implicit ethics and politics, helping us move beyond the human gaze with its colonising impulse. Instead, the speakers in Puwalska’s poems invite readers to immerse themselves in her fractalised syntax and to make meaning together. Phrases can branch in multiple directions, belong to more than one sentence. The poems work by imagistic association, by sound. Freeing us from the rigid logic of more conventional grammatical structures, they help us see – and live – freshly.