This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Maya C. Popa, whose poetry collection If You Love That Lady is out today from W. W. Norton. “What is a love poem? I’d make this one, / if only convention could keep up // with a heart’s multiplying gravities,” Popa writes in the book’s opening verse. Across If You Love That Lady, Popa explores what it means to love and be loved, to want and be wanted, and the ways that these experiences are, in turn, fueled by the act of writing about them. Through ups and downs, Popa’s collection retains a forward-looking hopefulness, as when she writes, “Desire’s what’s the matter / with our lives, a sea parting / to reveal another sea. / Its command renews, / swells and beckons: / you’d be a fool not to love / until the last second.” In a starred review, Publishers Weekly wrote, “With elegance, sly humor, and a difficult-to-pinpoint tone, somewhere between self-mockery and hope, Popa interrogates the terms, both the rules and the words, that bind lovers.” And Ocean Vuong called Popa “one of my generation’s finest poets—a truly peerless voice that realizes itself at such a startlingly scintillating pace.” Maya C. Popa is a Romanian American writer and the author of two previous collections of poetry, Wound Is the Origin of Wonder (Norton, 2022) and American Faith (Sarabande, 2019), which won the North American Book Prize. Her poems and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the Paris Review, the Times Literary Supplement, and elsewhere. She is also the poetry editor of Publishers Weekly, an educator in the undergraduate and MFA programs at NYU, and the founder of Conscious Writers Collective, a global online writing community.
Maya C. Popa, author of If You Love That Lady. (Credit: Diana Solis)
1. How long did it take you to write If You Love That Lady?
Five years.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Understanding the shape and arc of the collection was significantly more challenging than it had been for my previous two books. Because I was interested in letters but not interested in writing in an epistolary form, I had to figure out how to capture the candor and delay that letters energize without mimicking their structure.
My friend, the wonderful poet Declan Ryan, was the first person to read the poems. He sent me an old copy of The Dolphin (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973) by Robert Lowell, and for a short time, I thought I might borrow from Lowell’s approach. But Lowell’s recklessness and confessional intensity aren’t at all a part of my register, so it felt unnatural. Eventually, I realized there were subtler ways to make my preoccupations legible without imposing too obvious a frame.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
When I write, it’s most often outdoors—in the park, or anywhere I can be outside. But sitting down with a notebook or at the computer with the express purpose of writing happens rarely these days. I have periods of time in which I’m actively working toward a collection and others, like the one I find myself in now, when I’m simply tilling the soil from time to time, listening and waiting to see what questions or inclinations reveal themselves.
A great deal can be accomplished by writing every day, but I’m not in a stage of life where output matters most to me. That used to worry me, but I’ve come to understand the value of seasons in writing. I hope that I’m often thinking from my writer mind, that supple and intuitive place that takes notice when I’m not actively paying attention, even as I’m juggling other responsibilities.
4. What are you reading right now?
Wellwater (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026) by Karen Solie, Be Easy (Liveright, 2026) by Adrian Matejka, Lift Every Voice (Penguin, 2026) by Phillip B. Williams, and How to Have Sex in a Poem (FSG Originals, 2027) by Anahid Nersessian—all of which are fantastic.
5. What is the earliest memory that you associate with the book?
“One Way or Another,” the palindrome poem that opens the book, is also the first I remember writing for it. Its back-and-forth, snake-swallowing-its-own-tail quality would end up being emblematic of both those years and my experience assembling the manuscript.
6. What was your strategy for organizing the poems in this collection?
Ordering a manuscript is part intuition, part acumen. I usually try to weave threads that will create echoes and unexpected juxtapositions rather than siloing subjects by section.
As with my previous collection, the book is organized into three sections. Each engages with the same preoccupations from a different angle; the second section takes a slightly more skeptical view on the love and apostrophe poems in the first section, since the collection engages with the question of whether the beloved must, by the nature of eros, remain unreachable for the poet’s purposes.
The spirit of place is also central to the book, though its landscape is shifting across highways in the U.S. and the UK. Two long poems set in Romania make up part of the third section. By the end, the collection arrives at the possibility of self-actualization, redemption, and hope, which is a first for me. Not because those qualities have previously been in short supply, but because up until recently, I hadn’t figured out how to write about them with the complexity they deserve.
7. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
I encourage writers to take stock of their goals and their reasons for wanting to pursue an MFA. If what they’re looking for is two years of focused time, a consistent cohort, and close mentorship from a thesis advisor, then an MFA can be an excellent fit. I founded Conscious Writers Collective in 2024 specifically because I wanted to cultivate a space that would offer the same rigor, continuity, and artistic community outside of academia. We have 400 writers enrolled from around the world, and I’m encouraged to see more writers thinking carefully about which path is right for them.
It’s also worth remembering that most of literary history unfolded in the absence of MFA programs. The idea that an MFA is a prerequisite for publication is misguided, as is the assumption that it primarily functions as a networking opportunity leading to jobs in the field. An MFA is a space for deep learning and camaraderie, not a golden ticket. I’m deeply grateful for what I learned in my own MFA, but the education of a writer is lifelong.
8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started If You Love That Lady, what would you say?
It will come together, and you will one day be grateful for how uncertain you felt along the way. You will learn that you can feel completely, utterly stuck, and get unstuck. You will also learn that it’s okay—better, even—to say, “I’m not ready” to a publisher rather than hand over a manuscript you don’t yet love. There is no rushing the book you need to write.
9. Outside of writing, what other forms of work were essential to the creation of If You Love That Lady?
I’ve been teaching full-time for fourteen years, and it’s as central to my identity as writing. Helping readers and writers discover or deepen their relationship to poetry keeps my own ego and relationship to writing in healthy balance. I care a great deal about championing poetry and helping my students establish their own kinder relationship to writing. That purpose sustains me through the inevitable challenges and doubts that come with writing.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
In graduate school, Catherine Barnett advised me to stop relying so heavily on my intellect in the poem. I’m grateful that she was steadfast and direct about this rather than indulging my early “intellectualism” as “style.” It wasn’t style but rhetoric, lines that sounded nice but were deflecting from true feeling. Her advice that I lean into feeling rather than rhetorical gestures transformed my writing. It’s what has allowed me to write poems that [enable me to grow] both as a writer and a person.
