Maya C. Popa is the poetry review editor at Publishers Weekly and author of If You Love That Woman: Poems, A collection of poems inspired by nineteenth-century courtship letters is published this week from WW Norton. Below, she discusses why we can’t get enough of epistolary courtship.
I fell in love with Sally McDowell and John Miller during the pandemic, when I discovered their collected correspondence. She is a divorced woman from Virginia. He, a Presbyterian minister.
Their courtship begins with a rejection, then unfolds with years of letters written on the brink of civil war. They often scold each other for not writing faster and make sarcastic comments on the nature of the new paper or ink.
the characters are funnyIntimate, gentle. They are fantastic—one learns all kinds of unlikely things about Virginia and New England in the 1850s. But most importantly, one hears that deep, satisfying well of human strangeness: two irreconcilable, irreplaceable individuals who became more alive by writing to each other.
Author Love to eavesdrop. There is no richer act of listening than reading a collection of letters exchanged over the years. In “On the Addressee”, Osip Mandelstam explains why letters are so ripe for the literary imagination: a letter may never reach its intended recipient.
“A letter wrapped in a bottle has been thrown into the sea…I have found it. So I am the secret addressee.”
This is also true of apostrophe poems, addressed to an absent, imagined, or otherwise unreachable person. They are driven by a sense of their inaccessibility, a sense of never meeting the gap between what they want and what is desired. As readers, we turn to their elegant intimacy, becoming listeners and witnesses of uncertainty.
This was the energy I hoped to draw from for my third collection, if you love that woman (WW Norton, 2026). Not the characters themselves, but their charm, their blend of precision and vulnerability, measured craft and cosmic possibility.
In life, as we are all accustomed to instant contact, letters remind us what a productive place silence and delay can be. And if love is a luminous work of the imagination, letters are the best evidence of that continuing capacity over time.
