“Maya C. Popa wields the lyric like a reparative scalpel, evoking wonder and woundedness in equal measure.”―Meghan O’Rourke If You Love That Lady is a hymn to the pursuit of the unattainable. The title sequence dramatizes the paradox of correspondence: The private worlds shaped by the act of writing, and the expectant silences that charge our lives. Drawing from nineteenth-century courtship letters, the collection lingers in the rush of love and the resurrection that follows: “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 teach us that desire, like poetry, depends on revelation and restraint alike. Part elegy to the passing of impossible things, part ars poetica to the possibility of remaking, 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. "One of my generation's finest poets―a truly peerless voice that realizes itself at such a startlingly scintillating pace. I'm so grateful to be alive alongside Maya's poems, and even more so knowing she's just getting started. 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 own 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, NYT-bestselling author of All the Way to the River and Eat, Pray, Love "I began reading If You Love That Lady and a curious gossamer began to weave around me, within which I felt very calm and precise and moved. Something remarkable is at work here: an exact and exacting scintillation of thought and image that in sum becomes a shimmer. Reading it, one sees with a compound eye, as if looking upon human love as a dragonfly might, through countless tiny hexagons. A love story--love stories--tapering, tending to an asymptote; corners jagging; vectors precisely declining to meet; and all of it unsentimentally, brilliantly documenting 'what remains / of this extravagant, fatal, blinking life.'" ― Robert Macfarlane, author of Is a River Alive? Maya C. Popa is most recently the author of Wound Is the Origin of Wonder . She is the founder of Conscious Writers Collective, an online community for writers. The poetry reviews editor at Publishers Weekly , she lives in New York City.