American Faith
Maya C. Popa
Reviewed by Madeline Vardell
Maya C. Popa’s debut, American Faith, points a critical eye at the personal (digging into ancestral past), the collective (zeroing in on current politics), and the conscious poem-scape (transforming through metapoetry). Violence is the recurring thread and she’s interested in its architect. Her collection probes the stage before destruction, not of the exigence, but the maker. Humans fashion both art and war with our hands; hands can write poems and fashion bombs. Overtly and paratactically, she draws parallels between poetic craft and other labor. Craft and method are central and Popa’s collection feels written for other writers and linguists. Metapoems reference traditional poetic devices, “suddenly there’s you again / as per our lore,” and then her individual affinity for words. This heady discussion of sentences and language closes in on its power—abusive and transformative—dissecting it to show how language carries, shapes, and sometimes fails you.
Equally, memory is a rife commodity for Popa to manipulate and reference, as one poem ends, “Memory making more memory for me to / write from,” and another, “Memory, you crooked thing / I do to the page.” The unreliability of memory could get in the way, but not here, in Popa’s poetry, where there is no interest in fidelity. Memory takes on new lives and tenses; she recasts recent and past moments, projects them into the future, and gives them hoped for newness, even when nothing new comes. Thusly, American Faith is nostalgic yet focused on reality—in all its tenses and disappointments. “I used to think, if things got bad enough, / I could return to nature . . .” she writes, highlighting a failed expectation, like so many others harbored since childhood. She doesn’t shy away from naming our destructions, to the environment, and elsewhere in the book, to one another. Somehow, still, Popa continually carves at the past/present in pursuit of what her title poem so desires, “a kind of betterness.”