A brilliant second collection by Sally Wen Mao on the violence of the spectacle—starring the film legend Anna May WongIn Oculus, Sally Wen Mao explores exile not just as a matter of distance and displ
*FINALIST FOR THE 2023 MAYA ANGELOU BOOK AWARD * A virtuosic new poetry collection from Sally Wen Mao, "a consistently inspiring and exciting voice" (Morgan Parker) In The Kingdom of Surfaces, award-winning poet Sally Wen Mao examines art and history--especially the provenance of objects such as porcelain, silk, and pearls--to frame an important conversation on beauty, empire, commodification, and violence. In lyric poems and wide-ranging sequences, Mao interrogates gendered expressions such as the contemporary "leftover women," which denotes unmarried women, and the historical "castle-toppler," a term used to describe a concubine whose beauty ruins an emperor and his empire. These poems also explore the permeability of object and subject through the history of Chinese women in America, labor practices around the silk loom, and the ongoing violence against Asian people during the COVID-19 pandemic. At its heart, The Kingdom of Surfaces imagines the poet wandering into a Western
A "smart and deft" fabulist debut collection of stories re-imagining the nine-tailed fox spirit of Asian folklore (C. Pam Zhang). A fox spirit avenges a teen girl by seducing her abuser. A shapeshifting woman finds herself chased through the woods by fox hunters; meanwhile, an assassination plot called Operation Fox Hunt unfolds against the last Queen of Korea. Chinese migrants hoping to make new lives as "paper children" in America find their pasts--and their hopes for the future--embodied in the foxes that haunt the harbor in 1900s Angel Island. In the nine tales of Ninetails, acclaimed poet Sally Wen Mao reimagines the fox spirit from Asian folklore--a shapeshifter, shaman, and seductress--as an icon of vengeance, solidarity and liberation. The characters of her stories are varied--from silicone sex dolls who come to life with new purpose, to women whose crushes manifest as stones--but they all reach for a common purpose: to find truth and belonging in a difficult world determined
""Like Sylvia Plath's poems, these visionary poems are not only astute records of experience, they are themselves dazzling, verbal experiences. Worldly, wily, wise: Mad Honey Symposium is an extraordi
