Migrating Words: Liminal Identity in the Poetry of Anna Blasiak
Migrating Words: Liminal Identity in the Poetry of Anna Blasiak

Summary/Abstract: The present paper looks at the poetics of liminality in the writings of Anna Blasiak, a Polish-British queer poet and translator whose multifaceted identity is mirrored by her poetic discourse. Following a brief theoretical run-through aimed at contextualizing Blasiak’s poetry, the focus shifts to a curated selection of readings from her two published collections, “Cafe by Wren's St James-in-the-Fields” (2020) and “Rozpętanie / Deliverance” (2024), to illustrate how her verse draws on migration, memory and queerness to negotiate a sense of self through the creative use of bilingualism and linguistic hybridity. To trace the author’s linguistic trajectory, informed – inevitably – by her cultural experiences, the analysis also draws on a single poem from her yet unpublished third volume, observing the shift from bilingual writing and translingualism to English. Informed not only by a textual analysis but also by an interview conducted for this purpose, the study argues that the author’s voice emerges in the space between geographies, languages and cultures, making her work a site of cultural heritage, self-construction and reinvention. By situating Blasiak within the broader context of diasporic literature, we contribute to conversations about multilingual poetry, identity work, and the role of literature in articulating migrant experiences, highlighting the force of poetry to question and make sense of belonging. Although centered on the work of a single diasporic author, the paper speaks to broader questions of contemporary subjectivity by demonstrating that hybrid identity constitutes an increasingly normative mode of being.

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