By Anita Foxall.
For anyone familiar with Antosh Wojcik’s central presence on the poetry scene, the arrival of his debut collection Suburban Locust has been highly anticipated.
Antosh is an incredibly skilled poet and these poems are undoubtedly masterfully crafted. The collection unfolds as a surreal, storm-ridden family chronicle in which earthquakes and locusts become the book’s central metaphors for trauma, instability, and resilience.
There is a perpetual emotional, physical, and spiritual trembling shaping the entire reading experience.
The image of the locust, invoked immediately in the title, summons not only its biblical associations with plague and devastation but also its wider symbolism of swarm, crisis, and uneasy belonging, which are ever-present motifs throughout the collection.
Earthquakes are a constant presence too as recurring markers of instability, reflecting the family’s fractured inner world: a father’s drinking, a sister’s crises, a narrator’s anxieties. Each poem a tremor unsettling the household’s foundations, but also us, the readers. The book moves between Texas, Warsaw, and English suburbia, the “quake” is therefore nearly a omnipresent character as well.
Together, earthquakes and locusts create a mythic, apocalyptic atmosphere, yet one grounded in the very real emotional landscape of a family trying to hold itself together. A family that is fractured, but connected; loveable, but dysfunctional. The family is not idealised, instead, it is portrayed as a set of fault lines that nonetheless hold, trembling but intact, the central theme of the whole collection.
Across Suburban Locust, individual poems operate like snapshots of a family caught in ongoing tremors. Together, they create a narrative from childhood memories to the present-day crisis and trauma facing. The instability we are constantly reminded of via earthquakes, locusts, storms, and heat forms a link with the family and the surrounded ecosystem, a perfect (dis)harmony.
Above all there is a sense of survival, even if not a triumphant one, but persistent, resilient, grounded on life that is messy, painful and enduring.
Suburban Locust will take you to this world with vibrating memory, rupture, and fierce tenderness, and is a highly recommended read, or even better, if you have the chance of watching Antosh Wojcik perform these poems, don’t miss it, as he lifts them into another universe. His live delivery is always a powerfully honest experience, a journey into the universe created by his words.
Antosh’s next performance will be at Kim West’s Poetry Marquee at Bournemouth Writing Festival, check the programme here:
bournemouthwritingfestival.co.uk/poetry
Purchase the book here:
Suburban Locust / Antosh Wojcik – Bad Betty Press
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