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

“Maya C. Popa is an exquisite master at turning her experiences of the world into light, which she then shines into our hearts. Reading her poems is such an intimate engagement, like finding a room in your own house that you didn’t even know was there. This book opens the door." ― Elizabeth Gilbert, New York Times best-selling author of All the Way to the River

“Something remarkable is at work here: an exact and exacting scintillation of thought and image that in sum becomes a shimmer." ―Robert Macfarlane, author of Is a River Alive?

Set in America, England, and Romania, If You Love That Lady explores the inventiveness of longing and its relentless drive, proving that what breaks us open at last reveals us to ourselves.

Part elegy to the passing of impossible things, part ars poetica to the possibility of remaking, the stunning third collection from Popa draws on nineteenth-century courtship letters to linger in the rush of love and its fallout: “Happiness was no small thing, / but neither was its cost.”