American Faith

by Maya C. Popa

Overview

The ultimate subject of Maya Catherine’s stunning debut collection is violence. American Faith begins with its manifestation in our country: a destructive administration, a history of cruelty and extermination, and a love of firearms. “He owns a gun farm in Florida/they grow in swamps like chestnuts.” The poet introduces a suite of poems that precisely imagines the consequences, a series of “cancellations”—of government, bees, the color wheel, the return to nature, and the end of the world. The violence naturally extends to the personal. The speaker’s Romanian grandfather keeps wild dogs in case a man tries to steal his daughters. A godmother is psychologically erased by her tempestuous husband, who is nevertheless generous to flowers. “It’s what happened inside her/that slouched.” And what for some is routine can feel like an assault: a TSA agent wipes down a bra tucked in a traveler’s suitcase, adding, “prettiest terrorist I’ve seen all day.” Tentatively, the title poem casts light on the unexplored future, a solution that includes faith: “…the days, impatient, fresh beasts, appeal to me—You are here. You must believe in something.”  

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781946448477
Publisher:	Sarabande Books
Publication date:	10/15/2019
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Maya Catherine Popa is a Romanian-American poet and the author of two chapbooks, The Bees Have Been Canceled, named a Poetry Book Society choice in 2017, and You Always Wished the Animals Would Leave, published in 2018 (DIAGRAM chapbook series). She is the recipient of awards from the Poetry Foundation and the Hippocrates Society, and her writing has appeared in Poetry, Kenyon Review, Poetry London, and Tin House, among other publications. She holds degrees from Oxford University, New York University, and Barnard College. She directs the Creative Writing Program and teaches English literature at the Nightingale-Bamford School in New York City. 

Read an Excerpt

MINE’S NOT A POLITICAL HEART

All of my childhood fantasies—icescapes
with Alaskan cranes, treasure diving
in the Black Sea—Putin has beat me to them.

He drapes a medal over his shadow
then extradites the dead from purgatory.
I live with this deadweight of humor

and scorn until the humor burns out.
I know my birthmarks aren’t heraldic,
the sunspots transcribed don’t form

a line of sheet music. Blinking, I kill
a group of gnats; I kill only to see clearly.
Give me refuge from that sentence,

freedom from the choir sanctioning.
Each day, the grail looks more like a chalice.
Each day, the chalice more like a mug.


EAGLEM

Today’s violence is cross-referenced
under technology.

An eagle shot in the face by a hunter
successfully receives

a replacement beak. I do not know
who these people are

who snipe the sky&walk off
when they know they’ve missed the heart.

I know the eyes that spot
the dying animal, abandoned

for what’s called nature to deal with.
Th e hands responsible

for lifting the face&deciding to undo
what another human has done to it.

Someone will have to stabilize the bird
reading its deformity

for signs of infections.
Someone will have to see over

& over to suture the gash
where its beak once was,

another, engineer the yellow arc
so the bird can be outfitted

with a second chance,
photographed for science, released back

into its world as if only just returning
from a day of hunting mice.

I wonder what the hunters think
of these efforts taken to undo

their recklessness, the delicate building
back to square one after a failed

annihilation,&whether the part
of the body that registers shame

is ever called upon to answer.


AMERICAN FAITH

In Buddhism, di cult people are thought to be a gift.
This explains why I’m not a Buddhist.
I love the glib, slick farce of hardheartedness,
though I’ve held my human head
in my human hands so it would not
succumb to language. 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.
But when I try to imagine our president,
understanding imagination is the basis
of all faith, I suffocate on hatred’s loneliness.
I can’t stand the unity of my own hands,
how no part leads the writing of a word.
But this, too, is no faith that can be held,
scalds without tributary purpose. Like something
held to the light by its edges, I see the long years
ahead of me, full of voices of friends’
children’s children. I want a kind of betterness.
Want it desperately. Is that faith? While the days,
impatient, fresh beasts, appeal to me—
You are here now. You must believe in something.

Editorial Reviews

★ 10/21/2019

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, where “The season turns over/ with perfect indifference,” and even “The Bees,” as the title of one prose poem claims, “Have Been Cancelled.” How, the poems wonder, can one come to terms with the realities of this dark moment but through understated irony: “The principle of the gun law is that anyone/ should have the right to buy what may kill/ a room full of people—this failure is freedom.// I’m sorry there can’t be more poetry in this.” Child of immigrants, teacher, woman in a vulnerable body, the speakers of Popa’s poems seek to set the record straight, knowing how little anyone listens—to poetry, of course, but to other people in general. “I want a kind of betterness./ Want it desperately. Is that faith?” she asks. There are no good answers to questions like this, which it is the job of poetry to ask. Popa’s questing and questioning lyric poems are kind company amid the uncertainty of the modern world. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

“Poetic Lenses: Our Fifteenth Annual Look at Debut Poetry,” Poets & Writers
"Featured on Tracy K. Smith's The Slowdown Show"
Runner-Up of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry


"These carefully tuned poems dramatize a classical sensibility shaken awake by the ceaseless shock waves of Trump’s America, where 'The season turns over/ with perfect indifference,' and even 'The Bees,' as the title of one prose poem claims, 'Have Been Cancelled.' How, the poems wonder, can one come to terms with the realities of this dark moment but through understated irony: 'The principle of the gun law is that anyone/ should have the right to buy what may kill/ a room full of people—this failure is freedom.// I’m sorry there can’t be more poetry in this.' . . . Popa’s questing and questioning lyric poems are kind company amid the uncertainty of the modern world."
—Publishers Weekly, starred review

"American Faith depicts our current political moment with subtlety and grace."
—"American Faith: A Conversation with Poet & Editor Maya Popa – curated by Kristina Marie Darling," Tupelo Quarterly

"[A] stand-out debut from Romanian-American poet Maya C. Popa."
—"American Parables: A Review of American Faith by Maya C. Popa," EcoTheo Review

"American Faith announces Popa as a debut poet whose compassion, intellect, febrile imagination, and sharp ingenuity set a new standard of literary radiance. It is wholly astonishing to read this artist (part heart-diviner, part brain surgeon) harkening her ancestors and making this poetry of witness, this powerful song of loss and rage and wonder and survival. That survival (“memory, you crooked thing/I do to the page”) is musical, historical, epic and lyric (Popa’s work inhabits at least seven of the muses’ realms) and gives voice to what didn’t make it: a childhood tragedy, shadows of abuse and violence, the destruction of a child or a family or a species. The book is a world-traveling, time-leaping historical document, each poem a pin on the map of its self-interrogating, wildly hopeful journey to the center of a longed-for spiritual justice."
—Brenda Shaughnessy, author of The Octopus Museum

“In these striking, memorable pages we are reminded that violence, both public and private, is part of what it means to live in America today: 'A boy with a cricket rifle / kills his sister in Kentucky. / No teacher can show him / how to live with it.' Another poem announces, 'The government has been canceled.' The dictator 'drapes a medal over his shadow / then extradites the dead from purgatory.' There are guns everywhere, in a variety of colors— 'pink for girls to shoot squirrels.' Even love misses 'a shot for someone cute.' At the same time, American Faith appeals to the senses with its strange and beautiful song. How does Popa do this? How does she find that that keyhole, through which the ordinary becomes poetry, becomes a terrifying and unsettling lyric hymn?”
—Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa

"Maya Popa’s clear-eyed lyrics register with steady power a spectrum of 21st century violences as 'losses gracelessly accrue/without logic or pattern' and 'even the anchor/reading from a teleprompter/is surprised by what he has just had to say.' In poems that take on the devastating pressure of climate change, gun violence, and our threatened democracy, Popa uses her gift 'to anguish/and ascribe a language' to what has been lost—to grieve and in grieving forge song. Revelatory yet emphatically unsentimental, Popa’s unflinching distillations illuminate the facets of our broken world; there is much wisdom here, and grace, and heart. American Faith is a fierce and brilliant debut."
—Deborah Landau, author of Soft Targets

"Maya C. Popa’s poems move with a confident, quick-as-dread sweep toward an alarmingly clear articulation of what it is to be an American 'under/ duress by a language, its failure to imagine the present world or next. . .' Her lyrics address our huge unknowns, when 'The government is cancelled/ but not the body,' tides of unsorted information threaten to sink us, and in the poisoned sea 'the shame is that the parrotfish/cannot be remade from scratch.' American Faith marries a richly detailed music to this careening hour."
—Mark Doty, author of Deep Lane

From the Publisher