Maya C. Popa
AMERICAN FAITH Sarabande Books
It was earth that taught me names for all the planets, how to look at an angle for the hummingbird, dark satellite of sugar in the blossom’s mouth. I could picture that vast absence of us, moons spinning coolly in unscripted pasts. —from “American Faith”
HOW IT BEGAN: The heart of the book is a series in which different things— all, to some degree, metaphorical—are “canceled,” a term that’s deliberately glib paired against its subjects: the bees, the government, “the return to nature,” etc. The casualness of “canceled” felt at once chilling and right. The other poems in the book touch on themes and motifs from this series.
INSPIRATION: Certainly, for this project, the news. One of poetry’s many strengths is that it slows and suspends the moment, allowing a more nuanced examination of what otherwise flows through us quickly. Responding to world events or headlines through poetry allows me turn these things over in the light, to puzzle out the implications beyond the immediate reaction.
The reality is that poems are often the only answer to all that restless cogitation I feel daily.
WRITER’S BLOCK REMEDY: I may work in prose if I need more space to think on the page, or I may return to older drafts if I want the wild pleasure of making radical leaps and cuts.
ADVICE: Don’t worry about how much or how little you write. It’s judicious to practice some degree of selfdiscipline, assuming you’re serious about completing a project. But don’t compare your practice with that of others. Trust that as long you’re paying the right sort of attention to your life and the world, there’s a lot going on in the brain that will allow for writing to happen later on.
AGE: 30. RESIDENCE: New York City, but I go back and forth to London. JOB: I teach English literature and direct the creative writing program at an all-girls school. TIME SPENT WRITING THE BOOK: About four years.
TIME SPENT FINDING A HOME FOR IT: I first sent the manuscript out long before it was ready. I am grateful, in retrospect, that the early versions of this book were not the ones that stuck. I reordered and retitled the book one summer morning on Long Island, using various objects to keep the pages from blowing away and recognizing that I finally had what Zadie Smith calls “the head of a smart stranger.” I could look at the book impartially and see what needed to be done—which, in my case, was to cut a large portion of it. That was in August 2017, and I sent it out that fall. I was offered a contract with Sarabande as the runner-up for the Kathryn A. Morton Prize judged by Ocean Vuong about six months later.