Agnieszka Studzinska's Seamless challenges our relationship with language and uncertainty. Language in this collection becomes a ghostly haunt, tracing the journeys and moments in which the narrator encounters language's difficulties and absence. The collection asks what it means to make meaning in the natural world and in our everyday lives. The poems are set against a lyrical narrative of doubt and hesitation, where private moments open to larger philosophical questions. Even the ghost of Derrida is gently foregrounded in his own questioning of what it means to speak and write.
"It is the greatest privilege for a reader to see a poet deliver what feels like their masterpiece, where all their techniques, singularities of style, vision and experience coalesce into a work as forceful, coherent and alive as this. Seamless locates the self and the other within a rich tapestry of flora and fauna, never afraid to draw conclusions or to live with the uncertainty. Something immense and almost unnameable feels at stake in every poem. Studzinska is such a sonically enchanting poet, whose every word feels weighted and balanced against philosophical enquiry, and the imagery has the depth, the glow and the substance of an oil painting while also feeling utterly contemporary to our charged and anxious moment. A brilliant and inspired collection." -Luke Kennard
"It is an absolute delight to read Seamless, Agnieszka Studzińska's latest collection. At its core, the book explores what it means to read between the lines and to capture the liminality in language and cultures, opening up new possibilities of deciphering texts and meanings. Drawing from the works of Keats, Derrida and James Schuyler, moving from the 'pinched strings of violin-leaves', 'entangled speech' to the 'dead birds adorning edges / of our conversation', these poems are deeply philosophical and experimental, as they examine what truth means and feels, making sense of a strange but beautiful world and grappling with the hidden edges of things." -Jennifer Wong
"Agnieszka Studzinska's Seamless is a deeply intellectual and emotionally resonant book, attuned to the interstices, spaces and mysteries between language and philosophy, art and music - 'the ghostly science of this speech and writing already in us'. These quietly observant, subtly beautiful poems are written from and of both the body and mind. The collection explores a questing, interrogating stream of consciousness and thoughtfully considers 'the rhythm and the in-between spaces of/language that hears all impossibility'. The result is a delicate and sensuous poetics that pays attention to the absences, silences, hauntings of 'our beginnings and its supposed ends', 'what it means to live finally (with yourself)'." -Jennifer Lee Tsai
Studzinska, Agnieszka: - Agnieszka Studzińska has a PhD in Creative Writing from Royal Holloway University of London. She also holds an MA in Creative Writing from the UEA. Her first debut collection, Snow Calling was shortlisted for the London New Poetry Award 2010. Her body of poetry includes What Things Are (Eyewear Publishing 2014 and Branches of a House (Shearsman Books 2021). She has had several poems anthologised and featured in Writing Motherhood (ed) Carolyn Jess Cooke, Wretched Strangers, Borders Movement Homes, (ed) Agnes Lehóczky and numerous magazines. She teaches Creative Writing for the Poetry School and other educational institutes.
