If You Love That Lady: Poems

“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.