Wound is the Origin of Wonder

Whitman declared ‘what I assume you shall assume’ and Popa’s audacious reply is to transcend deadlock and reveal beauty wherever her gently subversive lyric freely wanders, with phrases freshly minted in lines whose intensity is as impactful and affirmative as lived experience. -- Daljit Nagra
Beautiful, musical, imaginative and blink-back playful poems. A very original voice in real lyric conversation with the self, with the other, with life and the creaturely world. A joy of a book. -- Ruth Padel
Maya C. Popa’s new book is an astonishment. In ravishing, formally exploratory poems, Popa wields the lyric like a reparative scalpel, evoking wonder and woundedness in equal measure . . . Wound is the Origin of Wonder reflects to us our own historical moment with unusual clarity, even as its lyric exploration of psychic and social landscapes stand outside of time. -- Meghan O'Rourke
''Wound Is the Origin of Wonder is stunning for how it miraculously balances tenderness and terror, poems of hovering anxiety and longing that also allow themselves to be turned toward pleasure. I am now, as always, thankful for poems that balance the fullness of the human experience. Maya C. Popa has done that here.' -- Hanif Abdurraqib, author of The Little Devil in America
'I am stuck in an almost life, / in an almost time,’ Maya C. Popa writes in the titular poem from Wound Is the Origin of Wonder. Suspended in the uncanny amber of such a time, such a place, we readers encounter ourselves, endlessly reprocessing our own pasts and worrying our futures as the vast roiling moment corrodes both. Still, Popa insists upon, if not hope exactly, then a world beyond the hopelessness this one inspires: ‘There are still things that cannot be imagined.’ Wound Is the Origin of Wonder is a complex, searching collection, one I will be returning to for years.' -- Kaveh Akbar, author of Pilgrim Bell
'"Dear Life," the opening poem of Maya C. Popa’s stunning Wound Is the Origin of Wonder, is worth the price of entry on its own. If I’d stopped there, this book would have given me more than I’d hoped for, but who could stop? Each poem, every single one, startled me with its precision and clarity. At times I gasped. Of course wonder is related to wound, awe to pain, and ‘every bright thing has at its heart a hiddenness / it offers when you’ve just about stopped looking.’ So we keep looking. We keep going. When I reached the end of this book, I wasn’t ready for its spell to be broken, not yet, so I began it again. -- Maggie Smith, author of Goldenrod
'Wound is the Origin of Wonder showcases Popa’s ability to weave together rich internal reflections with finely wrought observations of the natural world. True to its title, Popa’s collection traces the titular emotion all the way back to its origins, shedding light on the wound so that we may look with wonder on the fuller picture that emerges' * Harvard Review *
'In Wound Is the Origin of Wonder, Popa's elegant and moving exploration of grief and its causes and manifestations is more nuanced than simply observing that loss and living go hand-in-hand.' * New York Journal of Books *
'Subtle and gorgeous... The ecstatic language of these meditations and confessions is animated as much by pain as by joy.' * Publishers Weekly *
A reader will leave these poems hungry with the desire to see, to notice wildly – not only as a writer, but as a human being. * Mslexia *