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

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,...