Portrait of a Person Who Pushes Love Away in Fear of Losing It

by Isabelle Correa

Portrait of a Person Who Pushes Love Away in Fear of Losing It is a lyric, brutally honest, darkly funny portrait of a woman raised on violence, God, and American television, who spends her adult life trying to understand why she keeps mistaking hurt for love and keeps coming back anyway.

The collection begins in a childhood of Judge Judy reruns and evangelical youth groups, where the speaker learns that love is both salvation and weapon. From there, the poems plunge into the mess of her twenties and thirties: canceled weddings, mechanical bulls, tarot readers, bar bathrooms, and overseas apartments, a long parade of almosts and not-quites. Desire is a comedy and a haunting, a high and a hangover. The speaker cheats, self-sabotages, kisses everyone at parties, learns "to eat men like air."

Throughout, Correa braids intergenerational trauma, religious myth, and pop culture-Fleabag, Barbie, Sylvia Plath, country fairs, typhoon warnings, the Oscars-into an intimate, cinematic interior life. The voice is confessional and self-aware, willing to be ridiculous, horny, grandiose, and devastated in the same stanza. The speaker is bisexual, chronically hopeful, and permanently suspicious of hope; she wants to be a wife, a saint, a poet, a problem, and ultimately a person who can love without disappearing.

The collection closes not with a neat redemption arc, but with a hard-won willingness to stay-inside her own body, her grief, her desire, and her life-to see what love might be if it isn't a wound. 

ISBN:  978-1-968451-11-0
Page Count: 146

"This is a collection that refuses to behave or be boxed or be anything other than full and open hearted. Isabelle Correa writes desire as collision; body, memory, and longing crashing against the fragile idea of safety. These poems are sharp, darkly funny, and devastatingly honest about how we relentlessly return to intimacy, even when it hurts."

—David Gate, author of A Rebellion of Care

"Isabelle Correa’s latest collection is an unflinching exploration of love and longing, identity and healing, and the intricacies of romantic relationships. In her signature voice and gut-wrenching vulnerability, no secret is safe, and no topic is too taboo. From love to lobotomy, desire to desperation, vibrators to Judge Judy, Correa leaves it all on the page." 

—Jillian Stacia, author of Set the Bone