Notes from the EU's Eastern Edge is a bold, singular book—auto-ethnography with analytic bite, theoretically literate without scholasticism, and ethically self-aware. Along the Belarus–Poland frontier, it shows how Kremlin “migration engineering” met a ready-made European script of fear, pride, and denial. In border forests—and in newsrooms, museums, classrooms—it traces how memory politics and securitized compassion turn migrants into symbols, while bilingual gatekeepers launder hard edges into “responsible” discourse. The book’s core contribution is to shift Polish-populism studies from monist typologies to a processual account of a dialectical, polycentric regime of managed antagonisms—refusing the easy pejorative of “populism” and retaining an emancipatory horizon. Vivid reportage sits with compact documentary mini-cases to show how trauma, sovereignty and solidarity are being rewritten at Europe’s edge. Definitive for debates on borders, memory and the political unconscious in Central Europe.