Wound is the Origin of Wonder

by Maya C. Popa

I can’t undo all I have done to myself,
what I have let an appetite for love do to me.

I have wanted all the world, its beauties
and its injuries; some days,
I think that is punishment enough.

Maya C. Popa's poems explore the capacity of wonder to reawaken our appetite for the world, at a time that is fraught with the threat of endings, engaging lucidly with the most profound questions we face in our collective responsibilities and our relations with each other.

She writes with love and wonder of a world poised at a perilous “My children, will they exist by the time / it’s irreversible?” she asks. “Will they live / astonished at the thought of ice / not pulled from the mouth of a machine?” Popa takes seriously the poet’s duty to pay attention, to seek what Seamus Heaney called “the images... adequate to our predicament”.

To read her poems is to pause again and again at the precision of imagery, breadth of ideas, and the warmth and generousness of her lyric voice. These are beautiful and profound lyric poems that will delay you, affect you, and invite you to return.

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction, Literature, Grief

95 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 8, 2022

Reviews

[s.penkevich [hiatus-will return-miss you all]]

‘The wound is where the light enters us.’

I often think that poetry is one of the closest ways we come to magic in life. Poetry, rubbing two words together until they make fire. Something that can warm the heart, spark desires, or simply illuminate the darkness like a torch in the labyrinth of life. Dr. Maya C. Popa is a poet who cultivates and shares this love for the guiding light of poetry. I first discovered her through social media as she maintains an endlessly wonderful twitter feed directing readers towards poems sure to stir the heart, though her own poetry is also a blissful balm on our weary souls. Wound Is the Origin of Wonder, Popa’s follow-up collection to the rightfully applauded American Faith: Poems, traverses the both the grief and joys of life. The word ‘wonder,’ says the book’s epigraph, is thought to derive from the German wunde, where we also get ‘wound,’ and by this logic Popa shows us pain and joy as not opposites but inseparably two sides to the same coin of life. Inevitable experiences we grasp in contrast to one another. These poems flow through these concepts with a tone of acceptance—sometimes tragically—though never resignation, instead always flexing the muscles of hope to crumble the crusts of sorrow that try to harden around our hearts. With poems addressing loss, the recent pandemic, or even ghost crabs and peacocks, Popa’s elegant poetry breaks into the reader like a ray of light through a stormcloud with understanding and encouragement, always questioning amidst all the sadness the world can throw ‘when joy comes, will I be ready, I wonder.’

‘Begin again in darkness, life says sometimes.
Picture the trees burning in autumn,
the earth’s relief, at last, at being fallen.’

I appreciate the way Popa never shirks from hardships and hard subjects yet also never feels bogged down in them either. ‘I have wanted all the world, its beauties / and its injuries,’ she writes n the opening poem Dear Life , and this commitment to the spectrum of experience resonates through the entire collection. Yet it also goes deeper than merely juxtaposes joy and grief, digging into moments of loss to embody the sadness that comes from separation in a finite life to show that it is a risk we take for pursuing joy. ‘A sort of slow vanishing / your image from every vantage / absented,’ Popa writes of a lost love in Longing Explained by William James, and while the tone is somber, it is a reminder that opening ourselves up to the wounds of life is also the only way we can experience wonder. The whole maxim about it being better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all but expanded to a wide variety of experience. We must allow ourselves to lower our armor, give ourselves to the beauty of the world, acknowledge that wounds come with it, yet bravely embarking anyways.

‘The past is a country of held breaths
misread as silence, or the way things
had to be.’

Many of the poems brush on the griefs and separations of the recent COVID years, a time when ‘there was malice, but mostly / a kind of grief,’ as she writes in Late Genesis. There is a plea for ‘anything but illness, I beg the plagues, / but shiny crows or nuclear rain,’ wishing for a tenderness in all the hurt and fear. Popa’s toolbelt of historical allusions tie past and present, creating a timeless quality to her poems that remind us that our experiences are part of a larger human experience that has traversed the timeline of humanity and appeared in many reiterations of the same themes. Her allusions, often Biblical or references to scientific figures, wed ideas of spirituality and science in an interesting way that probe notions of experience that can’t be simply contained and explained within logic or academics.

Which is where the magic of poetry comes in and the ways it can give us an artistic perspective on life that explores meaning in the abstract. ‘I worry I’ll only / have words with which / to tell the story of what mostly / occurred outside language,’ Popa confesses, tapping into the root of the poet’s struggle to use the faulty nets of words to trap the ineffability of life. She wishes ‘to upend beauty for something / approximate,’ or to live life ‘for the ode of it./ The life that can’t be lived behind the eyelids’ It is a lovely sentiment, the idea of being a living poem.

Life is full of pain, but life also goes on, Popa tells us, or better put ‘time persists, yes, I can see there are new branches.’ This collection is absolutely gorgeous, embodying the ‘grains of happiness measured against all the dark’ as Jane Hirshfield writes in her own poem The Weighing. With Popa, we feel it is enough.

5/5

Dear Life

I can’t undo all I have done unto myself,
what I have let an appetite for love do to me.

I have wanted all the world, its beauties
and its injuries; some days,
I think that is punishment enough.

Often, I received more than I’d asked,

which is how this works—you fish in open water
ready to be wounded on what you reel in.

Throwing it back was a nightmare.
Throwing it back and seeing my own face

as it disappeared into the dark water.

Catching my tongue suddenly on metal,
spitting the hook into my open palm.

Dear life: I feel that hook today most keenly.

Would you loosen the line—you’ll listen

if   I ask you,

if   you are the sort of  life I think you are.

[Julie G]

I had an excellent writing teacher who once told me that poetry needs to be authentic, but it doesn’t need to be personal.

She went on to explain that if I’m describing intimacy, for example, what needs to come across in my work are my feelings about that intimacy, not whether I identify as straight or queer or asexual. The person reading my poetry doesn’t need to be whatever I am. It is the experience of intimacy we respond to, that shared feeling.

I was reminded of this advice during my introduction of Maya Popa’s poetry.

Maya Popa is a pretty big name in poetry right now. As far as I can determine, she is currently one of the top poetry editors in NYC.

Ironically, she’s in a position to be reviewing submissions by lowly poets like me, yet, I am, in this moment, reviewing her work.

It is obvious that she has the technical merit and the editing prowess to hand us this pretty, polished collection, but it is also obvious to me that she is holding back, not letting us in.

I found this a frustrating experience, and her poetry, published in 2023, reminds me a bit of John Updike’s first poetry collections. They were all technically sound and highly intelligent, but they lacked authenticity.

As Updike aged, he started letting us in, and, by the last two decades of his life, his poetry just opened up and became some of the best verse out there. (The man’s poetry, toward the end of his life, could leave you in a wet puddle. Just thinking about it: Damn!).

But, back to Maya Popa: Let us in! Let us in!

Please, stop mentioning Virgil and Milton and yachting and summering and parties in Paris. Almost no one can relate to this nonsense, anymore, particularly not in 2026.

Strip off your veneer. You’re a gorgeous mess, lady, just like the rest of us.

Here’s my favorite, from this collection:

NOT THE WOUND, BUT WHAT THE WOUND IMPLIES

Who can say
what the tulips dream
in a hard frost,

the sky as cold
as it is clear
and still unreadable.

Or how pain
decides what stays
in memory, a gift

broken by the time
it reaches us,
silvered, gleaming with age.

3.5, rounded up to 4

[Kim Lockhart]

The deep irony here is that much of what the author describes is how there isn't language to describe all of our experiences. There is so much I want to say about this little volume of poems, but I don't have, or can't find, the right words, except to say that the poet grabbed me, and has a talent for zeroing in on this complicated historical time of love, loss, trepidation, nostalgia, grief, and hope.

[Em]

Once again, Popa perfectly displays her ability to document experiences and thoughts in a way that is profoundly deep.

As someone who does not have the patience to untangle jargon, I often find myself revisiting her poems simply because they are accessible to the ‘regular reader’ and can also be enjoyed by the seasoned poetry buff. I enjoy the perfect balance of thought provocation and the careful telling of, a lot of times shared, experiences. Her newest book did not disappoint.

I highly recommend Aquarium, They Are Building A Hospital and Letter To Noah’s Wife to start, but there is not one poem in this book that you will not come away with at least a few moments of introspection.

[Gabriela Orozco]

Truly an incredible and weighty work of poetry. A manifesto for endurance and sacred wonder in life’s scattered moments. So grateful to have read.

[Anna]

Highlights: “Margravine,” “The Owl,” “The Peacocks,” “The Scores,” “After a Vase Broken by Marcel Proust,” “A Humbling,” and bits of the running title poem “Wound Is the Origin of Wonder”

[Juliano]

“The past is a country of held breaths / misread as silence, or the way things / had to be.” Maya C Popa’s second collection, Wound Is the Origin of Wonder, snuck in at the last minute to be my favourite poetry collection of 2022. As with all of her work, it gestures frequently beyond itself, metaphysical and spiritual even in its moments involved with interiority and personhood. “I’ve shot my arrow / and lived by its arc // and still, the hours / won’t acquit.” I enjoyed revisiting all the poems which had appeared in Dear Life — some, like ‘Milton Visits Galileo in Florence’, find themselves quite changed (the form and even the title of that poem being different across the two publications). And of course I enjoyed the glorious array of completely new poems: a trio of titular poems (only one of which appeared in Dear Life); ‘All That Is Made’, about my beloved Julian of Norwich; the gorgeous and sparse ‘Not the Wound, but What the Wound Implies’; ‘All Inner Life Runs at Some Delay’; the lovely poem ‘Letters in Winter’, with its Christmassy setting; and, one of my all-time favourite poems, with its focus on climate change and grief, ‘Letter to Noah’s Wife’, pure astonishment. I was moved by post-pandemic resonances in ‘Pestilence’: “Life was contagion; everything was life”, and “It happened to us all, this life.” There is much to say and more to love about Popa’s work, which to me is a spiritual successor to Mary Oliver’s work that is also informed by more classical figures like Donne and Keats. The book’s third part, focused on doom but also the transition from Winter to Spring, embodies Popa’s work. “When joy comes, will I be ready, I wonder.”

[Eliana]

January 2025 | 2nd Read

Is it possible that I screamed more this time? Poems that are for sure winter poems but not without the angst hope of blue hour. Imagine describing pain as “a gift / broken by the time / it reaches us” (from “Not the Wound But What the Wound Implies”). Or describing time in terms of fractures and flowers and fishbones? Or “latitudes of loss” as in “After A Vase Broken By Marcel Proust.” Goodness. And yet joy is coming! These poems do not despair despite their visceral terms of grief.

September 2023 | 1st Read

I kept swearing (gently) and laughing (dryly, like coughing) because these poems have a lot of audacity being so real, and sometimes there are no other actions to cope without crying.

[ra]

— “The first thing
to go when I shut the book between us
is the book; silence, its own alphabet,
and still something so dear about it.
It will be spring, I say over and over.
I’ll ask that what I lost not grow back.
I see how winter is forbidding:
it grows the heart by lessening everything else
and demands that we keep trying.”

[L.J.]

Gorgeous poetry. Each poem in WOUND IS THE ORIGIN OF WONDER is my new favorite poem. Each poem speaks to living past the pain of whatever your original wound was, "and with it / the peculair compulsion to keep living." I recognize her invocation to my younger self, "I've buried you each day / in the dirt of a life I keep tilling." Somehow Maya C. Popa has figured out the alchemy among image, lyrical line, and emotion. I wish I knew what it was, but I'll gladly accept her masterful poems as testimony to the wonder of life's paradox.

[Will Duanmu]

Popa writes with unyielding clarity in her second book of poems -- "The first time we met/we said goodbye,/then we never stopped/saying it." This is a book filled with light beyond grief and pain. It insists on wonder; that in the face of great fear, there is a lyric and piece of wisdom to be found. At heart, in this book, Popa demonstrates herself to be a writer of deep humanity. Now more than ever, poems like this are essential.

"But oh, to understand us,/ any one of us, and not to grieve?"

[John R.]

A thoroughly wonderful book, lovely and generous, beautiful.

[Sarah]

From my review at New York Journal of Books:

In Wound Is the Origin of Wonder, Popa's elegant and moving exploration of grief and its causes and manifestations is more nuanced than simply observing that loss and living go hand-in-hand. A loose narrative unfolds through the collection, beginning with a number of lyric poems touching on separation from an intimate other, as in “Longing Explained by William James”: "a sort of slow vanishing/your image from every vantage/absented.”

https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book...

[Kaye]

Favorite is "Dear Life" — love every line of that one. Other favorites include "Genii Loci," "Reading," "The Scores," the "Wound is the Origin of Wonder" poem on p. 54, "Letter to Noah's Wife," "Milton Visits Galileo in Florence," "Ghost Crabs," and "There Must Be a Meaning." Liked "Pestilence" and the other few poems that alluded to the pandemic, too, but the current public health crisis is still a bit too fresh for me — I will probably really like such poems in about 10 years.

[Nicholas]

This collection is indeed a wonder. It wounds the reader in a wondrous and wonderful manner.. The force and elegance of the language is a poetic ax swung into the hollow of our being. Like the speaker of Virgil's Georgics, the speaker in Wound Is the Origin of Wonder is often, if not always, enchanted with all things alive. Dr. Maya Popa delights us with her sublime breathtaking vision of the world.

[Sam]

alright. if I came across another of her books I’d read it probably. wouldn’t shit myself trying to get to the library though. might check it out and keep meaning to read it and never get around to it and turn it in three days early with a promise to revisit it someday.

[Kara]

Beautiful. Simply beautiful.

[Faith]

So visceral. It’s a work that lingers, “turning in you / like a pinwheel still,” as Popa writes, days after reading it.

[Jrussell]

Timely Gift from a Singular Poet Maya Popa

One should whole-heartedly embrace the gift of another Maya Popa book appearance—these poems reflecting the author’s characteristic longing and infinitely mysterious gratitude for the genius of the common place, the daily—the infinitesimal brilliance in enormity and moment of life as it swirls around us while its evil stepsister— cataclysm— blows into smithereens the mundanity of that very life. The clarity and nature of Popa’s perception stops the reader in her proverbial tracks with Popa’s elevation of the ordinary to center stage—making it impossible to ignore— and with her distinct narrative embrace and recognition of horror. Popa refuses to accept the misappropriation of genius in any of its forms and yes –wonder in our world lives on...
Pestilence: “It happened to us all, this life,” “They are building a hospital…;” Proust Breaker of Vases; Dear Life; The Tears of Things’ on the nature of suffering lacrimae rerum; the exquisite Wound verses, Milton Visits Galileo in Florence…. Popa’s awesome independence of mind, frank existential nerve, wit, and steely recognition of what sociologists term “the deformation of the gift” is exciting, resulting in virtuoso and provocative work imbued in mystery, gratitude, and sincerity.

Professor Judith Russell
Columbia University

[Betsey Osborne]

Wound Is the Origin of Wonder is the kind of book you want with you all the time. Open any page and you're guaranteed a precise and unusual image that will make you see the world freshly. For example, I open randomly and read "On the Subject of Butterflies," which begins with the lines "Trying to write about them is hopeless, / Those machinations colluding with air." Isn't that exactly what butterflies are!? Popa begins the book with "Dear Life," that explains "you fish in open water / ready to be wounded on what you reel in." By the end of the poem she's hooked herself or life has and she's asking, "Would you loosen the line?" The movements are breathtaking. In "Longing Explained by William James," she writes, "I met you in a place that is that place / because I met you the spine of English / softening between us." Softening! Do yourself a huge favor and meet Maya C. Popa in Wound Is the Origin of Wonder. You won't read anything better.

[Adam Carrico]

“When joy comes, will I be ready, I wonder.”

“I see how the winter is forbidding:
it grows the heart by lessening everything else
and demands that we keep trying.”

“How much more will this world enrage us
with its beauty, even as it leans towards last
assessments. And haven’t I minded you like this,
a cartographer patiently charting planets
before going mad with light?”

“The sky filled with stars that had been there already.”

“Noah’s wife, I am wringing
my hands not knowing how to know
and move forward. Was it you
who gathered flowers once they
had dried? How did you explain the light
to all the animals?”

“I’ve shot my arrow and lived by its arc”

“Dear Life” is an incredible poem. I love that it starts the collection.

[Fred Daly]

I like a book of poetry that coheres, and this one does. As I was reading, I was wondering if I could teach it, and I wasn't sure I could because a lot of the poems are cerebral and would frustrate most high school readers, but in the third section they become more topical (global warming, Covid), and I felt that students would be eager to see their own memories and anxieties explored in poetry. They would ultimately feel this is a demanding but rewarding experience.

[Anthony Immergluck]

Maya Popa is one of my favorite poets of her generation, and this is an absolute stunner of a collection. The first poem, "Dear Life," deservedly went viral recently, but I think the book is littered with pieces every bit as worthy of wide attention. In fact, to my ears, a lot of these poems sound like classics. Erudite but emotional, always lyrical but never gimmicky. Can't wait for her next book.

[L]

Wonderfully beautiful collection.

[Emily]

"We were never / loved by anything // the way tomorrow loved us then." --"In the Museum of Childhood"

[S꩜phie]

"Who would not, given acreage in another's mind, lie there for awhile to watch the sky be sky" "the sky filled with stars that had been there already" Ohhhhhhh yeahhhhh

[Mona]

Some really decent poems in here, and some that just did not quite hit the mark for me.

[Hannah Bonner]

Gorgeous.

[Kayla]

Absolutely loved reading this collection!

[Christopher Ferreiras]

This collection is a gift. It's been a while since I've read a body of work that left me feeling so seen, so well-known, and still so grateful to be a mystery at the same time.

Reading Wound Is The Origin of Wonder I felt these poems like a candid, intimate walk with the speaker. This walk is one comfortable with silence, rich with questions and curiosity, just as free to be without answers, but grateful for all that is found along the way.

These poems are not afraid to wander into the maybe's of life, into longing and melancholy, and above all else, it is not afraid to be without words, and therefore so full of meaning. It does not shy away from that precise, unique, way of loving both exclusive to the speaker, but also so deeply universal.