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 for the Kathryn A. Morton Prize judged by Ocean Vuong and was awarded the North American Poetry Book Award in 2020. She has received awards from the Poetry Foundation and the Oxford Poetry Society, among others. She 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, as well as degrees from Oxford University, New York University, and Barnard College. Popa is the Poetry Reviews Editor at Publishers Weekly and the founder of Conscious Writers Collective, where she teaches and oversees all literary programming for poets and prose writers.
Poetry
Current Issue
Had We But World Enough
Swifts plummetthrough strata of skyfor the pleasureof coming out alive.Cicadas rattlethe olive treesas wind skims the sea,electrifying stone.A cloud forms itselfrain atom by atom.I’ve been warnedthe sea turtle bitesbut know […]
Poetry
Current Issue
Charm City
Someone’s just failed to blow up the gridas a helicopter clatters, looking for Kathy.America discovered, as the song decreed,though beneath the seal-slick ease of scorn,there is a shame — of what, we’re […]
Poetry
Current Issue
London Zoo
For Saskia HamiltonEvenings in your dimly lit apartment,time passed like the revolving fountainin the penguin pool, its residentsmarching the modernist spiraluntil their yellow feet augured arthritis.The present: Neither of us […]
Poetry
Current Issue
Hawk Moth
There are no hummingbirds in the Old WorldI learned, thinking I’d seen one.Rather, its fine, ingenious hairsare feather-like to ward off predators.Hatched in buds with tongues doubletheir length to reach […]
Literary Curiosities
Spring 2024
February Clear
Sky rinsed blue above the yellow grass and wind-shorn clouds as thin as mist— how often I have failed to look when looking would have changed me. I can’t name […]
Nature’s Nature
May/June 2022
Pestilence
1 It began with a continent on fire. Any way you turned the globe, the flames bent with the wrist, the animals — God, the animals — in treetops, singed. The omens were there; […]
Literary Curiosities
Spring 2024
Trial of the Mayfly
The late medieval period saw an influx of animal trials. In spring, a live film on the water’s surface like a wind without point of motion, a gear gone wild […]