On 28 September, Poznań poet Katarzyna Grabowska will discuss her second collection, “twoje uda jak półwysep na którym nie można zbudować domu”, at Stowarzyszenie Les Pegazy.
The title alone sets the tone. Translated literally, it describes “your thighs like a peninsula on which a house cannot be built”, a striking image for a collection concerned with intimacy, desire and the complicated business of trying to make a home with another person.
Published by Wspólny Pokój in 2025, the book explores a relationship between two women through the details of everyday life. There is affection and physical closeness, but also uncertainty, misunderstandings and the fear that can accompany intimacy.
Rather than treating lesbian experience solely through the language of exclusion or identity politics, Grabowska's poems look at a relationship as a relationship: its routines, tensions, tenderness and attempts to hold two lives together.
A long pause between two books
The Poznań event also marks an unusual return to literary life.
Grabowska's first collection, Na końcu języka (At the tip of the tongue), was published by Staromiejski Dom Kultury in 2004. Her work had previously appeared in the Noc poetów (Poets’ Night) 2000–2002 anthology.
Then came a gap of around two decades.
Her new book, published in 2025, brings her back to poetry with writing rooted in love, sexuality, identity and ordinary life. The reasons for that long silence, and what prompted her to start writing again, will form part of the conversation in Poznań.
The discussion is also expected to move beyond the collection itself. Grabowska cites American poet Adrienne Rich as an important influence, opening up questions about when an intimate relationship between women becomes political, and whether that distinction can really be maintained when poetry deals with the body, love and domestic life.
Surrealism will also have a place in the evening, including the work of Leonora Carrington, whose imagination serves as an artistic reference point for the collection.
Poetry, intimacy and a question of visibility
The collection has already attracted attention from writer Sylwia Chutnik, who points to the relative lack of queer women's voices in Polish poetry, particularly among women of the middle generation.
Writing about Grabowska's book, Chutnik says:
The queer language of women in Polish poetry is not heard loudly enough. Especially the voices of women from the middle generation. As if the experience of mature women had to wait its turn in the queue for our attention. Meanwhile, we have a strong voice in Katarzyna Grabowska, and there is no point pretending any longer that lesbians do not exist. (…) Above all, these are poems about love. Love that goes right to the blood.
The observation places the collection in a wider literary conversation, while the poems themselves remain rooted in the particulars of a relationship: desire, domestic life, uncertainty and the effort to understand another person. Grabowska's perspective is that of a mature woman writing about love between women without reducing the relationship to a question of identity alone.
That combination of the personal and the wider question of visibility will form part of the Poznań discussion. The evening will also touch on Adrienne Rich, surrealism and Leonora Carrington, whose work provides an important imaginative reference point for the collection.
Event details
Katarzyna Grabowska: twoje uda jak półwysep na którym nie można zbudować domu
Date: Monday, 28 September 2026
Time: 19:00 - 20:30
Venue: W Uszach Są Pegazy, ul. Dąbrowskiego 7, Poznań
Entry: PLN 20
Registration: Advance registration is required.
The venue is through the black gate beside Teatr Nowy. The entrance code supplied by the organisers is 1397klucz (key).
The conversation is likely to be held in Polish, so international readers interested in attending may wish to take this into account when registering.
For Poznań's literary and LGBTQ+ communities, the evening offers a chance to hear directly from a poet whose return to writing has produced a collection centred on a part of everyday life that has not always had much space in Polish poetry: mature women's love for other women, described not as an abstract issue but through the ordinary, intimate experience of being in a relationship.
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