Maya C. Popa
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Recent Press
Review of American Faith in EcoTheo Journal
Nominated for a 2020 Pushcart Prize for "Wound is the Origin of Wonder”
The Scores Journal
Review of American Faith in PN Review
Review of American Faith in Poetry Review (UK)
“Of what, the poet asks, are human beings capable? The speaker asserts a steadfast presence which allows them to recognise disaster, but simultaneously move beyond it…In the book’s tension between recognising the necessity for words and the need sometimes to resist them, the speaker knows that to come through loss, despair must be confronted.”
Review of American Faith in American Poetry Review
“The desire for an alternative model of the relationship between self and other, in which ‘there’s no distance between me and the looking,’ manifests powerfully in the poem’s elisions and silences….Popa’s skillful work as the ‘arranger’ of “information/ available to anyone” creates a powerful and necessary moral framework for the reader to move through.”
Review of American Faith in The Arkansas International
“Popa’s collection feels written for other writers and linguists. Meta-poems reference traditional poetic devices, “suddenly there’s you again / as per our lore,” and then her individual affinity for words. This heady discussion of sentences and language closes in on its power—abusive and transformative—dissecting it to show how language carries, shapes, and sometimes fails you.”
Starred Review of American Faith in Publishers Weekly
“The poised debut from PW poetry reviews editor Popa is a book about the things and people—such as a boy from summer camp who was beaten to death by his mother—that “No logic, no language will bring... back.” These carefully tuned poems dramatize a classical sensibility shaken awake by the ceaseless shock waves of Trump’s America…Popa’s questing and questioning lyric poems are kind company amid the uncertainty of the modern world.”