The Kingdom of Surfaces
Poems
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
*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 fantasy, which covets, imitates, and appropriates Chinese aesthetics via Chinamania and the nineteenth-century Aesthetic movement, while perpetuating state violence upon actual lives. The title poem is a speculative recasting of “Through the Looking-Glass,” set in a surreal topsy-turvy version of the China-themed 2015 Metropolitan Museum of Art Gala. The Kingdom of Surfaces is a brilliantly conceived call for those who recognize the horrors of American exceptionalism to topple the empire that values capital over lives and power over liberation.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
By turns "maker, muse and beholder," Mao (Oculus) explores in her ruminative third collection the politics of beauty and the ironies inherent in culture and civilization under the sign of empire. Born in Wuhan, China, and living in New York City, the poet trains her mythopoetic gaze on the arts of China—especially silk and porcelain—from the techniques of production to the fraught histories of acquisition: "How language like history// neuters, neutralizes./ Looty, a dog, | Acquires/ a word forged in amnesia, shrouding provenance." The speaker's self-appointed task is to pull back this shroud, opening herself to ghosts: "Last night a woman from another century/ entered me, and her male phantoms possessed/ me, all night I was warm,/ cold and savage with their touch." Metaphors for the making of poetry abound: the nacreous formation of a pearl, pottery fired in "the kiln of history," "the looms, the threads, the hands, the cocoons." Capsule histories of the 19th-century craze for Chinese porcelain and violent anti-Chinese practices thread throughout, while postcolonial critique meets VR fantasy in the book's centerpiece: an extended, rapturous encounter with the Metropolitan Museum of Art's 2015 exhibit, China: Through the Looking Glass. Emerging from epic battles and "wreckage,/ wrack of flesh and blood tide," Mao brandishes her own tenacious imagination: "It's a miracle that I am wild."
