<p><b><i>I can’t undo all I have done to myself,<br>what I have let an appetite for love do to me.<br><br>I have wanted all the world, its beauties<br>and its injuries; some days,<br>I think that is punishment enough.</i></b><br><br>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.<br><br>She writes with love and wonder of a world poised at a perilous moment: “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
