Wound is the Origin of Wonder

A gorgeous collection from an American talent unafraid to embrace complexities and examine them under the lyric's precise light.

I can’t undo all I have done to myself,
what I have let an appetite for love do to me.

I have wanted all the world, its beauties
and its injuries; some days,
I think that is punishment enough.

Maya C. Popa's poems explore the capacity of wonder to reawaken our appetite for the world, at a time that is fraught with the threat of endings, engaging lucidly 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?” Popa takes seriously the poet’s duty to pay attention, to seek what Seamus Heaney called “the images. adequate to our predicament”.

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. These are beautiful and profound lyric poems that will delay you, affect you, and invite you to return.

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