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“One of my generation’s finest poets—a truly peerless voice. . . . An immense book and a searing achievement.” —Ocean Vuong, author of The Emperor of Gladness
The stunning third collection from award-winning poet Maya C. Popa dramatizes the paradox of correspondence: the private worlds shaped by the act of writing, and the charged silences that follow.
Drawing from nineteenth-century courtship letters, the collection lingers in the rush of love and its fallout: “Happiness was no small thing, / but neither was its cost.” Delivered with piercing elegance and signature wit—“What a formidable excuse he was. / What a pair of borrowed eyes / with a side of Keats”—these poems remind us that our appetites, like poetry, depend on revelation and restraint alike.
Set in America, England, and Romania, these poems are part elegy to the passing of impossible things, part ars poetica of remaking. If You Love That Lady explores the inventive, relentless drive of longing, proving that what breaks us open at last reveals us to ourselves.
From “Dark Matter”:
Desire’s what’s the matter
with our lives, a sea parting
to reveal another sea.
Its command renews,
swells and beckons:
you’d be a fool not to love
until the last second.
Maya C. Popa is the author of If You Love That Lady, forthcoming from W.W. Norton and Picador in 2026. Her previous collections include Wound is the Origin of Wonder (W.W. Norton 2022; Picador 2023), named one of the Guardian’s Best Books of Poetry. American Faith (Sarabande 2019) was runner-up in the Kathryn A. Morton Prize judged by Ocean Vuong and was awarded the North American Book Prize in 2020. She has received awards from the Poetry Foundation and the Oxford Poetry Society among others. Popa holds a PhD on the role of wonder in poetry from Goldsmiths, University of London, where she was a recipient of a department bursary for exceptional merit, and previous degrees from Oxford University, NYU, and Barnard College. Maya is the Poetry Reviews Editor at Publishers Weekly and is the founder of Conscious Writers Collective, where she teaches and oversees all literary programming for poets and prose writers.
If You Love That Lady.
Poems
Author: Maya C. Popa
English
Available for Sale: 14/07/2026
Hardcover
Price €34,00
ISBN 978-1-324-12456-6
80 pages
Publ.: W.W. Norton and Picador
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More in: Archive O-P, Archive O-P, Popa, Maya C.
Award-winning poet Maya C. Popa suggests that our restless desires are inseparable from our mortality in this pressing and precise collection.
Rooting out profound meaning in language to wrench us from the moorings of the familiar and into the realm of the extraordinary, the volume asks, how do we articulate what’s by definition inarticulable? Where does sight end and imagination begin?
Lucid and musically rich, these poems sound an appeal to a dwindling natural world and summon moments from the lives of literary forbearers―John Milton’s visit to Galileo, a vase broken by Marcel Proust―to unveil fresh wonder in the unlikely meetings of the past.
Popa dramatizes the difficulties of loving a world that is at once rich with beauty and full of opportunities for grief, and reveals that the natural arc of wonder, from astonishment to reflection, more deeply connects us with our humanity.
Maya C. Popa is a naturally gifted poet, lucidly engaged with the most profound questions we face in our collective responsibilities and our relations with each other. She writes with love and wonder of a world poised at a perilous moment: “My children, will they exist by the time / it’s irreversible?” she asks. “Will they live / astonished at the thought of ice / not pulled from the mouth of a machine?”
To read her poems is to pause again and again at the precision of imagery, breadth of ideas, and the warmth and generousness of her lyric voice.
Maya C. Popa is the poetry reviews editor at Publishers Weekly and teaches poetry at New York University.
Wound Is the Origin of Wonder: Poems
by Maya C. Popa (Author)
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
November 8, 2022
Language: English
Hardcover: 96 pages
ISBN-10: 1324021365
ISBN-13: 978-1324021360
Hardcover $21.49
Paperback $15.99
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More in: #Modern Poetry Archive, - Book News, - Bookstores, Archive O-P, Archive O-P, Popa, Maya C.
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