Woman : Plant : Language
Agata Masłowska
Book of the Month: September 2025
Reviewed By Nazaret Ranea
When I first sit with a poetry collection, I always give the first and last poem special attention. I want to see how they speak to each other, what kind of doorway and farewell the poet offers. In Woman : Plant : Language, we begin with the tight, sour grip of ‘Lemon’ and end with ‘Purple’, the colour of irises. This arc feels like a bowing spine to me, a body slowly giving in to gravity. It’s one of many ways this collection traces decay and identity with grace. This is a book where women are not only close to nature: they are nature. They are landscape, they are language, they are soil. In ‘Hania at the End of the World’, Masłowska writes ‘When I die / I am only afraid of being eaten by worms.’ It’s not dramatic. Just true. This poem, with its village imagery and shared plums, holds mortality in its mouth without the need to chew.
A central metaphor throughout the collection is figs, which become a symbol of reproductive freedom, autonomy and the body claiming space. This can be seen perfectly in ‘Female Figs Closed on all Sides, Supposed to Be Monsters’:
A female fig keeps its ovaries in confinement.
It lets a female wasp in through an ostiole to pollinate
its inner florets. The wasp dies in a tight space,
unable to lay eggs. The fig digests it. Perhaps
it is out of mercy.
This is just one example of how this collection invites us to rethink how we look at plants, fruits and the female body. The shape of the poetry often echos this: a lighthouse becomes a vertical poem, a woman becomes a polyhedron of textures and names, shifting places on the page, turning around, moving in a way that only the wind can recreate.
Language here feels alive, mutable, appropriated, and as a migrant woman myself, it all feels very personal. I’ve also had to learn a language by living it, not just studying it, but breathing it in. In ‘The Tongue’, Masłowska writes:
My tongue is made of the myriad
of linguistic cells merging without
the need for a birth certificate.
And in ‘A Lack of Knowledge’:
My body is so fragile and full of languages.
What language will I speak to nature?
W jakim języku będę rozmawiać z naturą?
I do not know.
Masłowska also reclaims taxonomy, giving plants back their Latin names: Calluna vulgaris, Maranta leuconeura. The women in these poems seem to have always known these names. You get the sense they’ve lived far from cities, and are seeing things otherwise forgotten.
There is also something very tender in how the book speaks of belonging not purely as territory but by giving belonging itself a voice. Some pieces feel more like sensory flashes than full poems and I occasionally wished for a little more grounding or connective tissue between them. But maybe that’s part of the book’s logic: to let poems grow like plants.
This is a beautiful, necessary collection. Full of knowledge, memory and life. Masłowska gives us women who are both poems and landscapes, fig trees and tongues, full of soil and syllables. I know I’ll carry these poems with me. They’ve already taken root.
Woman : Plant : Language is published by Bad Betty Press
Nazaret Ranea is a poet from Málaga, Spain, based in Edinburgh. Named one of Scotland’s Next Generation Young Makars, her debut collection Nettles (Drunk Muse Press, 2025) explores themes of migration, nature, and work. She has performed on BBC Radio Scotland and at the Edinburgh Fringe, the Edinburgh International Book Festival, and StAnza, where she was 2025 Poet in Residence.