Pop Song: Adventures in Art and Intimacy

Larissa Pham

Hardcover |13.8 x 2.8 x 20.4 cm | 288 pp

Serpent’s Tail | 2021 | 9781788168021

Plumbing the well of culture for clues and patterns about love and loss – from Agnes
Martin’s abstract paintings to James Turrell’s transcendent light works, and Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet to Frank Ocean’s Blonde – Pham writes of her youthful attempts to find meaning in travel, sex, drugs and art before sensing that she might need to turn her gaze upon herself.

Pop Song is a celebration of the strange and delicious state of falling in love, whether
with a painting or a person, interwoven with incisive commentary on modern life. Pham creates a perfectly fractured portrait of modern intimacy, triumphant in its vulnerability and restlessness. Here is a book about all the routes by which we might escape our own needs before finally finding a way home.

‘…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.’ Larissa Pham

Shortlisted for the 2022 National Book Critics’ Circle John Leonard Prize for best first book.