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About Oculus: Poems
About the Author Sally Wen Mao is the author of a previous poetry collection, Mad Honey Symposium. Her work has won a Pushcart Prize and fellowships at Kundiman, George Washington University, and the New York Public Library Cullman Center. Product Description FINALIST FOR THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE FOR POETRYA 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 displacement but as a migration through time and a reckoning with technology. The title poem follows a nineteen-year-old girl in Shanghai who uploaded her suicide onto Instagram. Other poems cross into animated worlds, examine robot culture, and haunt a necropolis for electronic waste. A fascinating sequence spanning the collection speaks in the voice of the international icon and first Chinese American movie star Anna May Wong, who travels through the history of cinema with a time machine, even past her death and into the future of film, where she finds she has no progeny. With a speculative imagination and a sharpened wit, Mao powerfully confronts the paradoxes of seeing and being seen, the intimacies made possible and ruined by the screen, and the many roles and representations that women of color are made to endure in order to survive a culture that seeks to consume them. Review “There are eyes everywhere in Oculus, but not all of them are blessed with sight. Some are all-seeing, panoptic; others are yearning and blinkered, unable to return the gaze they attract. These poems are haunted by images of human faces staring out from all kinds of screens, faces that are themselves screens upon which the world projects its fantasies and anxieties. . . . The poems in Oculus are rangy, protean, contradictory. They offer an alternative to the selfie, that static reduction of a person to her most photogenic poses.”―The New Yorker“In her stunning second collection, Mao stages a searing ventriloquy act. . . . These depictions speak and fight back against the white gaze that has framed them.”―NPR Books“By telling [Anna May] Wong’s story, and those of other women of color who have been defined by images in popular culture, [Oculus] explores the ramifications of being seen and objectified but never truly known.”―The Washington Post “If you love the work of Janelle Monáe, you'll love Oculus. From the very introduction, Sally Wen Mao doesn't hesitate to make sure the reader knows this is a book about Asian Futurism and the way technology impacts us all. The section on Hollywood will destroy you, focusing on telling the story 1930's actress Anna May Wong. But really, Oculus is both complex, but totally universal.”―Marie Claire “Oculus is a deftly structured volume of hauntingly perceptive poems, peering backward through the 20th century while penetrating our contemporary moment. It’s an homage to pioneering Chinese Americans and an indictment of Asian representation in American culture, which never for a moment shies away from the difficult tasks of taking on race and history and technology all at once, but confidently looks them right in the eye, unblinking.”―Vulture“Stunning, expansive. . . . [Oculus] marks Sally Wen Mao as one of the most compelling, provocative poets working today. . . . Mao’s language beautifully encompasses both the natural and technological worlds, infusing both with humanity, and offering a crystal clear vision of the ways in which our culture corrupts and consumes those who don’t fit within it seamlessly.”―Nylon “Mao’s poems weave deeply between the quotidian and the global, limning the afterlives of those absent from history but over-used as representation. They remind me of the connections between aesthetics and politics: how we must imagine otherwise in order to affect political change.”―Anne Anlin Cheng, BOMB“Sally Wen Mao’s poetry is at once speculative, sharp, lush, and precise. . . .
