Maya Catherine Popais a writer and teacher in NYC. She is the recipient of the Editor's Prize from the Poetry Foundation. Her chapbook The Bees Have Been Canceled (2017) was named a Poetry Book Society Summer Choice. Popa holds degrees from NYU, Oxford University, and Barnard College. She is a member of the English Faculty and oversees the Christine Schutt Visiting Writers program at the Nightingale-Bamford school in New York City.

Books by Maya Catherine Popa:

Other poems on the web by Maya Catherine Popa:
"Broken Periodic"

Maya Catherine Popa on Twitter.

About You Always Wished the Animals Would Leave:

"This is a work of seething precision. In these poems, hope is a meticulous, meditative state—a method of forensic searching and study that is carried with great care across generations. By stitching her raging images together with stillness and poise, Popa asks us to step back from our panic and look: 'peeling back the hair, that quiet, necessary artifice, / to reveal a nesting doll of impulses.'"
—Caroline Bird

"In Maya Catherine Popa's You Always Wished the Animals Would Leave, feathers are unfulfilled parables, a hen's eggs turn a vicious red, and a super moon 'blooms a tyranny of flowers.' A helix of histories lies threaded to both the present day and the various magics of night. These poems are smart and lush, and at the end of each of them my heart, mind, and ear argue over which was lavished with the most pleasure. I am enchanted by this book, in its thrall, its bright gravity, its terribilitá."
—Traci Brimhall