“Contemporary poetry is full of scrupulously researched, rather lifeless ‘project’ books; a lesser poet than Mao might have stuck to the historical Wong, out of some misplaced sense of fealty or respect. But Mao’s fabricated [Anna May] Wong is a wild creation … The real escape, Mao’s work suggests, is poetry, which tracks the mind as it moves through embodiments not transmittable by visual means. I thought of the sublime conclusion of Yeats’s ‘Among School Children’: ‘O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, / How can we know the dancer from the dance?’”

—The New Yorker, “Sally Wen Mao Writes Visionary Poems for a Blinkered World”

 

Recent publications:

“Hot Spring Ghost Story,” story, The Offing

“On Silk,” poem, Granta

“On Porcelain,” poems, The New England Review

“Loquats,” poem, The Paris Review and The Pushcart Prize XLVII: The Best of the Small Presses 2023 Edition

“Haibun: Spring” and “I Will End the Line of My Ancestors,” poems, The Virginia Quarterly Review

“Cherry Picking Season” and “A Nacreous Woman,” poems, The Yale Review

“Paris Syndrome,” poem, The American Poetry Review

“High Rise Syndrome,” essay, The Believer