Pop Song

‘…I don’t know what comes after, once I decide to let desire have its way with me. How to un-melt the melted? How to turn the ground powder back into a person? This idea points to a knowledge that I don’t have: how to love without losing the self.’

Plumbing the well of culture for clues about love and loss – from Agnes Martin’s abstract paintings to Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet to Frank Ocean’s Blonde – this brilliant work of debut nonfiction explores the state of falling in love, whether with a painting or a person.

Pham creates a perfectly fractured portrait of modern intimacy, triumphant in its vulnerability and restlessness. Pop Song is a book about distances: the miles we travel to get away from ourselves, or those who hurt us, and the impossible gaps that can exist between two people sharing a bed. Here is a map to all the routes by which we might escape our own needs before finally finding a way home.

Author Biography

Larissa Pham is an artist and writer in Brooklyn. She has written essays and criticism for The Paris Review Daily, The Nation, Art in America, the Poetry Foundation, and elsewhere. She was an inaugural Yi Dae Up Fellowship recipient from the Jack Jones Literary Arts Retreat.