If You Love That Lady

"One of my generation’s finest poets – a truly peerless voice. . . . An immense book and a searing achievement" – Ocean Vuong

If You Love That Lady is a hymn to the pursuit of the unattainable. 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 the nineteenth-century courtship letters of American pastor John Miller to Sally McDowell, ex-wife of the former governor of Baltimore, 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.