"Popa’s subtle and gorgeous second collection (after American Faith) maps the conflicting effects of having “wanted all the world, its beauties,/ and its injuries.” The ecstatic language of these meditations and confessions is animated as much by pain as by joy. Popa, a reviews editor at PW, refuses to disparage the world simply because it does not offer “the good news I had hoped for” and mines childhood for glimmers of hope to light the contemporary darkness with “Full days settled by wildflower and stone.” She also asks for passion and tenderness in love (“Let’s be hungry a little/ while longer. Let’s not hurt each other if we can”) to counter the weight of the pandemic, lifted a little when “Friends fed the day hope/ like a broken fever.” She turns to literature—Milton, Gilgamesh, the Bible—as well as to nature (and even WebMD) for guidance, seeking consolation wherever it may be found. “The wound is where/ the light enters us,” she writes. Indeed, in these pages, the truth of each day is brutal but also beautiful."
―Publishers Weekly, starred review
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.
― The 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.
― The NY Journal of Books
available here
“This book is an astonishment. In ravishing, formally exploratory poems, Maya C. Popa wields the lyric like a reparative scalpel, evoking wonder and woundedness in equal measure: ‘It’s plain we didn’t see / the future coming,’ she announces. Searching for a spring that brings renewal, lamenting ‘snow / that vanishes with touch,’ her poems register a unique combination of imperilment and possibility, with imagistic precision one can’t forget: ‘A faint hiss―that is / your own life now, hurrying / from one light to another.’ 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. This is a book I will return to.”
“‘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.”
“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.”