Something New from Someone We Admire: On July 14th, the great Maya C. Popa releases If You Love That Lady — her stunning third collection of poems, and we couldn’t be more excited to share the news with you.
Maya is one of our favorite poets, and If You Love That Lady is her most ambitious and accomplished work yet. Ocean Vuong calls it “an immense book and a searing achievement,” and hails Maya herself as “one of (his) generation’s finest poets—a truly peerless voice.” And we agree!
Drawing from nineteenth-century courtship letters, the poems in this new collection consider the rush of love and its aftermath, at the same time illustrating the private worlds shaped by the act of writing and the silences that follow.
Check out this single, stunning poem from this new collection, first published last November in The New Yorker.
The others in If You Love That Lady are equally remarkable.
“I wrote this book trying to get to the bottom of my own understanding of how time, place, and distance shape the stories we tell ourselves about desire,” Maya has wrtten about this new collection. “If you’ve ever found yourself inventing a person on the page or discovering yourself through the page, this book is for you.”
Poem after poem, Maya’s work is wonderful. Get If You Love That Lady!
Did you know that it’s more important than ever for writers to encourage pre-orders of their upcoming releases?
Pre-order If You Love That Lady before it’s publication on July 14th to join Maya for an exclusive brand-new Five Things I’ve Learned class, live and online Saturday, July 25.
Something new from us, too: In celebration of Maya’s latest release, we’re doing all we can to help spread the word and encourage pre-orders of If You Love That Lady.
On Saturday, July 25th at 10:am Pacific / 1:00pm Eastern, Maya joins us for her live second Five Things I’ve Learned class — Five Things I’ve Learned About Manuscript Mixtapes — presented again in partnership with the Conscious Writers Collective.
In this ninety-minute session, Maya will share the poetic touchstones that have shaped her voice and vision, and that lie at the heart of If You Love That Lady. She’ll illustrate the ways that poets often create what she calls “manuscript mixtapes” — setlists not of music but of other preceding poems with which their own work is in conversation.
As she’ll explain, Maya’s own mixtape includes work by Milton, Wordsworth, Eliot, Lowell, and Yeats, and in addition to talking generally about the ways in which poets incorporate and extend the efforts of writers who matter to them most, she’ll also share how each of these writers shaped the poems in her new collection, and how you might similarly incorporate your own favorite precursors in your own writing.
In addition, Maya will also walk us through the magical, idiosyncratic process of assembling a manuscript — the intention, the intuition, and the simultaneous honoring and incorporating of the poets who came before.
Please note the special time. It promises to be a wonderful session, and we hope you’ll join us.
For book publishers, pre-orders of an upcoming release foreshadow corresponding public interest, which in turn encourages greater publisher support both before and after the book’s release.
That’s why we’re delighted to WAIVE THE TICKET PRICE FOR THIS CLASS and to offer free admission on Saturday, July 25 at 1 PM ET to anyone who preorders the book and sends us a copy of the purchase receipt.
The first — and we think the better deal — is to pre-order If You Love That Lady for just $27.99 anywhere the book is sold and receive a free ticket to the class. Simply pre-order the book before its release date on July 14th, and forward your receipt to pre.event@extendedsession.com. We’ll take care of the rest.
Prefer to skip the book for now? You’re welcome to purchase a ticket on its own for $60.00 by visiting the class page via the button below.
Either way, we hope to see you there, live on July 25th.
And, in case you missed it: Maya joined us once before for a brilliant session — Five Things I’ve Learned About Writing Desire. You can view the replay of the opening minutes of that class by following the link below.
More about Maya: Maya is the author of three collections of poetry. Her previous collection, Wound is the Origin of Wonder (W.W. Norton, 2022), was named one of the Guardian’s Best Books of Poetry. Her debut, American Faith (Sarabande, 2019), was runner-up in the Kathryn A. Morton Prize judged by Ocean Vuong. She holds a PhD on the role of wonder in poetry from Goldsmiths, University of London, and is the Poetry Reviews Editor at Publishers Weekly. She is also the founder of the Conscious Writers Collective, where she teaches and oversees all literary programming for poets and prose writers.
As always, thanks for being part of Five Things I’ve Learned. Visit myfivethings.com.
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