{"product_id":"if-you-love-that-lady","title":"If You Love That Lady","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003e\"One of my generation’s finest poets – a truly peerless voice. . . . An immense book and a searing achievement\" – Ocean Vuong \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eIf You Love That Lady \u003c\/i\u003eis a hymn to the pursuit of the unattainable. The stunning third collection from award-winning poet Maya C. Popa dramatizes the paradox of correspondence: the private worlds shaped by the act of writing, and the charged silences that follow. Drawing from the nineteenth-century courtship letters of American pastor John Miller to Sally McDowell, ex-wife of the former governor of Baltimore, the collection lingers in the rush of love and the resurrection that follows: ‘Happiness was no small thing, \/ but neither was its cost.’\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDelivered with piercing elegance and signature wit – ‘What a formidable excuse he was. \/ What a pair of borrowed eyes \/ with a side of Keats’ – these poems teach us that desire, like poetry, depends on revelation and restraint alike.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePart elegy to the passing of impossible things, part \u003ci\u003ears poetica\u003c\/i\u003e to the possibility of remaking, \u003ci\u003eIf You Love That Lady\u003c\/i\u003e explores the inventiveness of longing and its relentless drive, proving that what breaks us open at last reveals us to ourselves\u003c\/b\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57502275010933,"sku":"9781037404177","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781037404177.jpg?v=1786781097","url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/products\/if-you-love-that-lady","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}