If You Love That Lady: Poems

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.