National Poetry Month: Sally Wen Mao
Created by Bob Helmbrecht, collection development librarian
Our contemporary poet for today is Sally Wen Mao.
Mao's debut poetry collection was "Mad Honey Symposium," published by Alice James Books in 2014. Poet Terrance Hayes said of this book: "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 extraordinary debut."
Mao's next collection was 2019's "Oculus," published by Graywolf Press. From the publisher's description: "Sally Wen Mao explores exile not just as a matter of distance and displacement but as a migration through time and a reckoning with technology." Author Ocean Vuong said of the collection: "Both scalpel and flood, poems of brooded, subtle syntax that build and accrue toward inevitable and stifling ferocity. Mao's work reclaims for itself an acidic possibility."
"The Kingdom of Surfaces," published in 2023, was Mao's third and most recent poetry collection. From the publisher's description: "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." Poet Sarah Kain Gutowski, reviewing the collection in the “New York Journal of Books,” said "'The Kingdom of Surfaces' is mesmerizing, gorgeous for its attention to language and image, and equally horrifying for what it holds before our gaze and how it challenges that gaze."
Mao also has a collection of short stories, "Ninetails: Nine Tales," coming out in May from Penguin Books. Check out a book by Sally Wen Mao today!
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