Pisanki

In 1940, a young girl is taken from her home in Eastern Poland to Arkhangelsk, Siberia; in 1942, she boards a train. Seventy years later, that journey is reimagined by her granddaughter, Zosia Kuczyska. As Kuczyskas poems tell the story of her babcia, her maternal grandmother, coming to England, she confronts some of the big questions of art and history: how do you tell another persons story without exploiting it? Whats at stake when we try make patterns out of the past, and can we ever leave those patterns behind? Kuczyskas poems are both richly narrative and sharply attentive to the complexities of home and culture. They capture human endurance through the redrawing of political maps, from the heat of Easter in Tehran to the powdered eggs and stocking shortages of the London Blitz.