Maya C. Popa, WOUND IS THE ORIGIN OF WONDER

Tue Mar 25 2025 at 07:00 pm to 08:00 pm UTC-07:00

The Elliott Bay Book Company | Seattle

Elliott Bay Book Company
Publisher/HostElliott Bay Book Company
Maya C. Popa, WOUND IS THE ORIGIN OF WONDER
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Award-winning poet Maya C. Popa visits the store to discuss her collection, Wound is the Origin of Wonder
About this Event

About the Book

In Wound is the Origin of Wonder, award-winning poet Maya C. Popa suggests that our restless desires are inseparable from our mortality. Rooting out profound meaning in language to wrench us from the moorings of the familiar and into the realm of the extraordinary, the volume asks, how do we articulate what’s by definition inarticulable? Where does sight end and imagination begin?

Lucid and musically rich, these poems sound an appeal to a dwindling natural world and summon moments from the lives of literary forbearers—John Milton’s visit to Galileo, a vase broken by Marcel Proust—to unveil fresh wonder in the unlikely meetings of the past. Popa dramatizes the difficulties of loving a world that is at once rich with beauty and full of opportunities for grief, and reveals that the natural arc of wonder, from astonishment to reflection, more deeply connects us with our humanity.

About the Author

Maya C. Popa is the author of two collections, Wound is the Origin of Wonder, named one of the Guardian’s recent best books of poetry, and American Faith, runner-up in the Kathryn A. Morton Prize judged by Ocean Vuong and winner of the North American Book Prize. Her poems and essays appear in The Atlantic, the Nation, Poetry, the Paris Review, the Times Literary Supplement and elsewhere. She holds a PhD on the role of wonder in poetry from Goldsmiths, University of London, where she was a recipient of the English department bursary for exceptional merit. She was previously a Clarendon Scholar at Oxford University, where she reserved her MA, and a Veterans Fellows at NYU, where she earned her MFA. Her newsletter, Poetry Today, is one of Substack’s best-selling featured publications. Since 2018, she has served as the Poetry Editor of Publishers Weekly and Director of Creative Writing at the Nightingale-Bamford School. She teaches advanced poetry at NYU.

Purchase your copy of Would is the Origin of Wonder here.

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Event Venue & Nearby Stays

The Elliott Bay Book Company, 1521 10th Avenue, Seattle, United States

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