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American Faith: Poems
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."
- GenresPoetryLiterary Fiction
96 pages, Paperback
First published October 15, 2019
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180 people want to read
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July 17, 2025
The world is often a rough, reckless, and unwelcoming place but with poetry we can often make it beautiful. Such is the task of a poet, balancing the reality and not shirking from the darkness, yet still casting a light of hope across such desolate landscapes of life. As another poet, Maggie Smith, once wrote ‘you could make this place beautiful.’ The beauty and the brutality arrive hand in hand in Dr. Maya C. Popa’s astonishing collection American Faith, a volume published in 2019 as the end of a disastrous reign was sounding its death throes yet, now half a decade later, it feels as relevant and timely as ever seeing as the disastrous reign nonsensically took power again as if to prove Star Wars’ “somehow Palpatine returned” moment wasn’t far fetched. Straddling the personal and the political amidst discourse on violence, toxic masculinity, xenophobia and other trappings of tyranny, American Faith delivers vulnerability and visceral imagery that arrives by turns both despairing and humorous. Drawing upon her Romanian identity in context of US hostility towards immigration during a rapidly fracturing empire, Popa sends the reader soaring into blissfully accessible yet deeply thoughtful and heartfelt examinations of hope while despairing, of the titular “faith” ‘“gaining momentum/ around an emptiness.’ Winner of the 2020 North American Book Prize, American Faith is a stunning review that will certainly stir within you.
Broken Periodic
No one who has ever had a childhood
wants what's happening. No one
who has ever wondered anything:
where the rain’s heard in her steel hooves.
Questions wrongly put swell
like moths under a light. On the streets,
everything looks human. You forget
certain animals are bloodless injured.
You must imagine some other color
that means hurt. At night, you sleep
with something like your gifts: to anguish
and ascribe a language, music.
To slice a fight the long way and linger.
To grieve for a country.
To grieve without a country to grieve.
It is a true treat to dive into Popa’s dazzling prose. She takes sharp aim with her words, netting heart and mind to reverberate with each line like a grandiose chorus of emotions and language. Having loved her second collection, Wound Is the Origin of Wonder, I was thrilled to remember I still owned a copy of this one I had enjoyed years ago but never ended up reviewing at the time (I had a multi-year hiatus that came to an end during the pandemic). This collection certainly holds up and hits with just as much relevance as it did upon release. That the issues discussed within the poems, particularly the violence, male aggression, and horrific dehumanization by the ruling regime, aren’t only still lingering but have festered into larger problems, however, is quite concerning. Yet her words are like a balm for the soul, especially when she crafts such vibrant imagery like in the multi-part poem Elegy where, in the final section, she writes:
That summer lost its baby teeth
Until the sun couldn’t chew our skin
Into a tan, and we retreated to our homes
Like pale, astonished fish, and our friendships
Bewildered us, coagulating, vanishing.
There is a real playfulness here in spite of the harsh themes, employing dynamic symbolism and figurative language such as a poem using birds as a metaphor of male aggression, or a discussion on the hunting of squirrels as a gateway into discussing larger atrocities. Violence permeates the collection, however, such as the poem The Song of Male Aggression in which she discusses the predicament of women in a society where the aggression of men often goes unchecked or meet few consequences:
One boy offered me a necklace,
another cut it from my throat.
I'd forgotten until I heard the singing;
two robins in autumn disputing
open space.
The theme continues through much of the collection, looking at toxic masculinity as both a symptom of Trumpism as well as a driving force that made it possible and harms the nation and world on a daily basis. As she writes in American Cowboy, which is certainly one of the standout poems in the collection:
There's no plot in the Old Western,
only masculine delirium,
and the promise,
part childish, part challenge,
of frontier.
There is also a wry humor at work in these poems, which give them a rather dynamic texture. This is a key aspect to her work and something Popa discussed in an interview with Tupelo Quarterly, talking about how she wants the reader to ‘still feel permitted to laugh despite the seriousness of the ostensible subject’ because ‘beauty and humor live alongside deep apprehension, of which there is plenty here.’ The effect is marvelous and makes for an endlessly engaging read as well as some playful titles such as The Government Has Been Canceled.
What is this world we are making
for each other? A slaughter that cannot
be rendered or mean. Who will study it
From the back of the darkened class,
By the silence of the projector’s click.
—from Terribilità
The political is never far from the poems here as Popa chronicles the horrors under a bloated regime where ‘our losses gracelessly accrue / without logic or pattern,’ which is certainly something that could be said as well about 2025 as well with the utter lack of a legitimate platform and random firing of agencies while dumping further more money into anti-American organizations like the unemployed tax-grifters in ICE. She ponders the hearts of abusers, hunters, and those in power questioning ‘whether the part / of the body that registers shame // is ever called upon to answer,’ or confronts the lack of imagination that accompanies the absence of dignity and self-respect in the current White House occupant in the titular poem:
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.
Popa sees poetry as a valuable tool of resistance, capturing the present and resisting the false framing of the ruling class in order to better engage with the reality of events and the emotional as well as physical harm done when violence hides behind the twisted narratives of the power-hoarders. As she discussed in her interview in Tupelo Quarterly:
The personal also arrives alongside the political here with Popa drawing on her Romanian identity to examine the gatekeeping of the US and the daily tiny aggressions against immigrants or anyone outside the white male hegemony. In Is This Your Bag Please Would You Open It, she depicts the powertrips of TSA agents and the blend of racism and misogyny faced by women of color as a TSA agent openly gets too cozy with the speaker’s packed bras and says ‘prettiest terrorist I’ve seen all day.’ Throughout the collection we are confronted with atrocities, great and small, and Popa casts her poetic gaze across them all. ‘We agree one violence / is great than the others,’ she writes in Uranium in English about a class discussion on violence, ‘but a string of tiny violences / makes the largest possible.’ Hopefully by recognizing such despair, we can light a candle of hope against it.
‘We’re counted on to make a safety of our minds,
A world out of objects shared between us.’
—from Yard Sale
Dr. Maya C. Popa’s debut, American Faith is a poignant and poetically marvelous collection. A view of the US in a time of crisis and an examination of the personal amidst the political, this collection hones in with razor sharp wit and insight of the social ills of the present. A moving, stirring collection you won’t want to miss.
5/5
‘What will it take
To start over again
With a myth we might perhaps outlive?’
Broken Periodic
No one who has ever had a childhood
wants what's happening. No one
who has ever wondered anything:
where the rain’s heard in her steel hooves.
Questions wrongly put swell
like moths under a light. On the streets,
everything looks human. You forget
certain animals are bloodless injured.
You must imagine some other color
that means hurt. At night, you sleep
with something like your gifts: to anguish
and ascribe a language, music.
To slice a fight the long way and linger.
To grieve for a country.
To grieve without a country to grieve.
It is a true treat to dive into Popa’s dazzling prose. She takes sharp aim with her words, netting heart and mind to reverberate with each line like a grandiose chorus of emotions and language. Having loved her second collection, Wound Is the Origin of Wonder, I was thrilled to remember I still owned a copy of this one I had enjoyed years ago but never ended up reviewing at the time (I had a multi-year hiatus that came to an end during the pandemic). This collection certainly holds up and hits with just as much relevance as it did upon release. That the issues discussed within the poems, particularly the violence, male aggression, and horrific dehumanization by the ruling regime, aren’t only still lingering but have festered into larger problems, however, is quite concerning. Yet her words are like a balm for the soul, especially when she crafts such vibrant imagery like in the multi-part poem Elegy where, in the final section, she writes:
That summer lost its baby teeth
Until the sun couldn’t chew our skin
Into a tan, and we retreated to our homes
Like pale, astonished fish, and our friendships
Bewildered us, coagulating, vanishing.
There is a real playfulness here in spite of the harsh themes, employing dynamic symbolism and figurative language such as a poem using birds as a metaphor of male aggression, or a discussion on the hunting of squirrels as a gateway into discussing larger atrocities. Violence permeates the collection, however, such as the poem The Song of Male Aggression in which she discusses the predicament of women in a society where the aggression of men often goes unchecked or meet few consequences:
One boy offered me a necklace,
another cut it from my throat.
I'd forgotten until I heard the singing;
two robins in autumn disputing
open space.
The theme continues through much of the collection, looking at toxic masculinity as both a symptom of Trumpism as well as a driving force that made it possible and harms the nation and world on a daily basis. As she writes in American Cowboy, which is certainly one of the standout poems in the collection:
There's no plot in the Old Western,
only masculine delirium,
and the promise,
part childish, part challenge,
of frontier.
There is also a wry humor at work in these poems, which give them a rather dynamic texture. This is a key aspect to her work and something Popa discussed in an interview with Tupelo Quarterly, talking about how she wants the reader to ‘still feel permitted to laugh despite the seriousness of the ostensible subject’ because ‘beauty and humor live alongside deep apprehension, of which there is plenty here.’ The effect is marvelous and makes for an endlessly engaging read as well as some playful titles such as The Government Has Been Canceled.
What is this world we are making
for each other? A slaughter that cannot
be rendered or mean. Who will study it
From the back of the darkened class,
By the silence of the projector’s click.
—from Terribilità
The political is never far from the poems here as Popa chronicles the horrors under a bloated regime where ‘our losses gracelessly accrue / without logic or pattern,’ which is certainly something that could be said as well about 2025 as well with the utter lack of a legitimate platform and random firing of agencies while dumping further more money into anti-American organizations like the unemployed tax-grifters in ICE. She ponders the hearts of abusers, hunters, and those in power questioning ‘whether the part / of the body that registers shame // is ever called upon to answer,’ or confronts the lack of imagination that accompanies the absence of dignity and self-respect in the current White House occupant in the titular poem:
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.
Popa sees poetry as a valuable tool of resistance, capturing the present and resisting the false framing of the ruling class in order to better engage with the reality of events and the emotional as well as physical harm done when violence hides behind the twisted narratives of the power-hoarders. As she discussed in her interview in Tupelo Quarterly:
‘I think we’re in a highly productive and generative period of poetic engagement in this regard, with many very fine poets answering back to political discourse and rhetoric that by turns eschews responsibility, instigates violence, and upholds inequity. Poems can offer a deeper vision of political engagement and inquiry through language than what is practiced by the media. They can, as poets well know, capture and speak to the moment without reducing its complexity. It can feel daunting to engage with a topic that’s in the zeitgeist in a new and meaningful way. I think, however, that that anxiety is present to varying degrees with more traditionally “literary” topics too, and that none of that should stop us from engaging responsibly and thoughtfully with the plights of the moment. My only advice would be to focus less on relaying a fixed idea of what you know or think to be true, and to proceed with the earnest hope of being surprised.’
The personal also arrives alongside the political here with Popa drawing on her Romanian identity to examine the gatekeeping of the US and the daily tiny aggressions against immigrants or anyone outside the white male hegemony. In Is This Your Bag Please Would You Open It, she depicts the powertrips of TSA agents and the blend of racism and misogyny faced by women of color as a TSA agent openly gets too cozy with the speaker’s packed bras and says ‘prettiest terrorist I’ve seen all day.’ Throughout the collection we are confronted with atrocities, great and small, and Popa casts her poetic gaze across them all. ‘We agree one violence / is great than the others,’ she writes in Uranium in English about a class discussion on violence, ‘but a string of tiny violences / makes the largest possible.’ Hopefully by recognizing such despair, we can light a candle of hope against it.
‘We’re counted on to make a safety of our minds,
A world out of objects shared between us.’
—from Yard Sale
Dr. Maya C. Popa’s debut, American Faith is a poignant and poetically marvelous collection. A view of the US in a time of crisis and an examination of the personal amidst the political, this collection hones in with razor sharp wit and insight of the social ills of the present. A moving, stirring collection you won’t want to miss.
5/5
‘What will it take
To start over again
With a myth we might perhaps outlive?’
Read
June 7, 2024Some great stand out poems in this collection. Most of my enjoyment came from the exploration of violence as a theme throughout the whole. Will be looking out for more publications from Popa!
April 20, 2020
A collection of poems reflecting on american violence and the sometimes hope that keeps us going. There were many perfect phrases.
From Lewisburg:
Driving down a highway in August, saving for later
the right word for now, desire whittled me
a tool I'd never seen before
but knew how to use almost immediately.
From the Song of Male Aggression:
One boy offered me a necklace,
another cut it from my throat.
I'd forgotten until I heard the singing;
two robins in autumn disputing
open space.
From American Cowboy:
There's no plot in the Old Western,
only masculine delirium,
and the promise,
part childish, part challenge,
of frontier.
From Lewisburg:
Driving down a highway in August, saving for later
the right word for now, desire whittled me
a tool I'd never seen before
but knew how to use almost immediately.
From the Song of Male Aggression:
One boy offered me a necklace,
another cut it from my throat.
I'd forgotten until I heard the singing;
two robins in autumn disputing
open space.
From American Cowboy:
There's no plot in the Old Western,
only masculine delirium,
and the promise,
part childish, part challenge,
of frontier.
March 22, 2020
The poet is a friend of a friend, so I was hoping to like this collection, and I did. I shared a couple of them with my students (one of whom was Popa's student in middle school!), and we had really great, robust discussions. It's very much about our current national moment, but like any worthy book, it also transcends the moment. When I teach a poetry course in a couple of years, I think I'll use this book.
Want to read
September 30, 2019To read. Great poem by author called "Letter to Noah's Wife" in American Academy of Poets email for Sept 30, 2019. Also, possibly relevant for study of violence in literature from Iliados until now.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
March 8, 2020
A fine selection of timely poems by a perceptive poet. Good reading.
March 22, 2020
Pretty sure I didn’t understand most of this book.
January 22, 2021
The poems in American Faith seem like something of a farewell to the Trump administration (although the book was published before that person left office). Maya Popa is able to lend a deeply expressive voice to commonly held frustrations born of those painful four years, as in the opening of the poem "American Faith":
In Buddhism, difficult people are thought be to a gift.
This explains why I'm not a Buddhist.
Perhaps my favorite poem in this collection is "American Cowboy", which deftly tackles the warped masculinity which has caused so much damage to our nation:
There's no plot in the Old Western,
only masculine delirium,
and the promise,
part childish, part challenge,
of frontier.
In several of these poems, Popa draws on her Eastern European background to explore the legacy of communism, and how it informs her perspectives of her new home in the United States. She does so without rancor, and it's that spirit of belief and renewal that makes American Faith a collection that I'll be returning to again.
In Buddhism, difficult people are thought be to a gift.
This explains why I'm not a Buddhist.
Perhaps my favorite poem in this collection is "American Cowboy", which deftly tackles the warped masculinity which has caused so much damage to our nation:
There's no plot in the Old Western,
only masculine delirium,
and the promise,
part childish, part challenge,
of frontier.
In several of these poems, Popa draws on her Eastern European background to explore the legacy of communism, and how it informs her perspectives of her new home in the United States. She does so without rancor, and it's that spirit of belief and renewal that makes American Faith a collection that I'll be returning to again.
January 14, 2023
Soaring language to bring you up and then throw you into the swamp of what it’s like to painfully exist here and now. Popa is extremely talented and I look forward to reading more of her work.
March 10, 2021
This book came into my hands purely by accident, and I fell in love with the first poem. Beautiful lyricism, clever enjambment-- she writes how I think. A new favorite for sure.
January 27, 2025
“I mean, it’s true, but does all pain / now seem a waste to you?” Maya C. Popa’s debut collection of poems American Faith is just magnificent, brimming with poems reflecting on youth and loss, friendships and family, and life in America, in an America soured by Trump and environmental disaster and a crisis of both identity and faith. Many of the poems in the book appeared in You Always Wished The Animals Would Leave, the 2018 pamphlet that first introduced me to and enamoured me with Maya’s work, but many were new to my eyes, and I loved every single one. I especially enjoy the titular poem, with such realisations as “I love the glib, slick farce of hardheartedness” and “I suffocate on hatred’s loneliness” sharply animating an ideological opposition to even “imagin[ing] our president”. I also found Hummingbird to be deeply moving, the striking imagery and the light melodic flow in a perfect dance always: “while inside our losses gracelessly accrue / without logic or pattern”. Maya C. Popa is undoubtedly one of the best we have.
November 14, 2022
my GOD. absolutely marvelous. maya arranges words in ways that are just breathtaking and so much fun to read. i love the range of topics she explores, from things as simple as honeybees to as complex and devastating as american imperialism. i borrowed this from the library but will be buying asap. these poems burrowed into me and i need them close.
August 5, 2021
4/31
Oof. Where will we be in 50 years? What will people think of this little time we are currently living in? Will they please pick up this collection and read it for the #Sealey Challenge (which will of course still be going), will they have a new mythology, and will they see half of what Maya C. Popa sees? She has faith, an American faith, but she is clear-eyed and crystalline. This is a hard-won faith, "a complicated thing,/gaining momentum/ around an emptiness." Indeed.
(Ooh, small note. I take issue with the printing of this book. The cover is too stiff and uncomfortable in the paperback version. Small quibble, I know, but this is a book one wants to hold, to prop open, to fold back pages, to carry with you. And this particular paper doesn't really lend itself to such.)
#SealeyChallenge #MayaCPopa
From "American Cowboy"
"And the tumbleweed,
a complicated thing,
gaining momentum
around an emptiness.
Truly, inside is nothing,
and it protects that nothingness
that built it--
this, its language, its politic.
What will it take
to start over again
with a myth we might perhaps outlive?
It's the cowboy who the cowboy saves."
Oof. Where will we be in 50 years? What will people think of this little time we are currently living in? Will they please pick up this collection and read it for the #Sealey Challenge (which will of course still be going), will they have a new mythology, and will they see half of what Maya C. Popa sees? She has faith, an American faith, but she is clear-eyed and crystalline. This is a hard-won faith, "a complicated thing,/gaining momentum/ around an emptiness." Indeed.
(Ooh, small note. I take issue with the printing of this book. The cover is too stiff and uncomfortable in the paperback version. Small quibble, I know, but this is a book one wants to hold, to prop open, to fold back pages, to carry with you. And this particular paper doesn't really lend itself to such.)
#SealeyChallenge #MayaCPopa
From "American Cowboy"
"And the tumbleweed,
a complicated thing,
gaining momentum
around an emptiness.
Truly, inside is nothing,
and it protects that nothingness
that built it--
this, its language, its politic.
What will it take
to start over again
with a myth we might perhaps outlive?
It's the cowboy who the cowboy saves."
June 17, 2023
(More and more I hate giving stars to other people's work. You wrote a book? Five stars for doing what the rest of us only dream of doing. And you know, not many of us are qualified to give "reviews" so that sucks too and I don't want to do it anymore. Anyway, here's my notes about this particular book.)
These are poems about the violence seeded and flourishing in much of every day American culture. They were written during Voldemort's presidency and I can feel that deep sadness in Popa's writing, but poetry is also about finding ways to hang on, and there are beautiful things woven in as well.
"Eagle"
"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...."
These are poems about the violence seeded and flourishing in much of every day American culture. They were written during Voldemort's presidency and I can feel that deep sadness in Popa's writing, but poetry is also about finding ways to hang on, and there are beautiful things woven in as well.
"Eagle"
"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...."
July 24, 2025
"No one who has ever had a childhood
wants what's happening. No one
who has ever wondered anything:
where the rain's headed in her steel hooves.
Questions wrongly put swell
like moths under a light. On the streets,
everything looks human. You forget
certain animals are bloodless injured." (68)
wants what's happening. No one
who has ever wondered anything:
where the rain's headed in her steel hooves.
Questions wrongly put swell
like moths under a light. On the streets,
everything looks human. You forget
certain animals are bloodless injured." (68)
May 20, 2021
I discovered Maya C.Popa by searching poets with Romanian background. Love her poetry and ordered
all her books.
all her books.
July 7, 2022
Poetry is often difficult to recommend because it either feels inaccessible or like it is written down to the reader.
Maya Popa instead writes poems that pull readers up into them, inviting everyone in and offering the language necessary to interrogate the poems themselves.
The poems are not always transparent, but they make the act of wrestling through them satisfying.
I also really appreciate Popa's impulse to make poetry "do" something—It's not insular or abstract, and you can feel an almost missional intent to make the reader better.
Maya Popa instead writes poems that pull readers up into them, inviting everyone in and offering the language necessary to interrogate the poems themselves.
The poems are not always transparent, but they make the act of wrestling through them satisfying.
I also really appreciate Popa's impulse to make poetry "do" something—It's not insular or abstract, and you can feel an almost missional intent to make the reader better.
October 6, 2021
“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.”
I’m telling’ ya, when she drops the “want it desperately” in that poem, it just hit me hard. Some gems in this collection.
You are here now. You must believe in something.”
I’m telling’ ya, when she drops the “want it desperately” in that poem, it just hit me hard. Some gems in this collection.
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews