When Does It Matter? Queer Polish Thoughts on Resistance by Ela Przybyło

Ela Przybyło’s urgent collection When Does It Matter? Queer Polish Thoughts on Resistance explores Polish queerness in dialogue with experiences of immigration, navigations of bilingualism, and histories of intergenerational trauma. While questions of immigration and queerness have been explored by many poets, little work has been authored exploring Eastern European immigrant queerness. Inspired by feminist and queer hybrid writing, and using a writing form the author terms “poetic theory,” Przybyło interweaves multiple language traditions and draws on an often-unexplored archive of queer Polish writers toward envisioning what an antiracist Polish queer positionality might look like. In this stylistically vivid collection, the reader is transported through accompanying photographs taken by the author. And across poetic reflections and, indeed, interrogations of family, history, and society, Przybyło refuses to acquiesce, instead asserting—and twerking toward—“wanting / life / my own my own.”