Mad Honey Symposium
Alice James Books, May 2014
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-938584-06-0
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Mad Honey Symposium, a debut collection, is a lush investigation into feral nature and the ways in which people poison themselves for pleasure. There is a honey from a region of the Black Sea so tart it stuns the tongue and so powerful it deranges the senses, expelling all food from the stomach and igniting febrile, hallucinatory visions. Through the twin lenses of this mad honey, storied in mythology and used as a weapon of biological warfare, and the honey badger, the world’s most fearless creature, Mao reveals a sensorium of emotions and linguistic dares.
Praise for Mad Honey Symposium
”Linguistically dexterous and formally astute, Mao’s tight and textured debut [Mad Honey Symposium] conjures an absurd, lush, occasionally poisonous world and the ravenous humans and animals that travel through it. . . . With echoes of Glück and Plath, Mao generates stunning landscapes where the flora and fauna reflect her presence and strength of voice.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“The luminous image of a mouth ‘digesting light’ and later spitting ‘the light out because it sears you‘ underscores the ways Sally Wen Mao transforms sense (and sentence) into sensation. 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.”
—Terrance Hayes
“This is one way to render the feeling—a massive nuclear reaction; an intensity of flavor that parts flesh—of losing yourself in Sally Wen Mao’s debut Mad Honey Symposium. It’s a 'dendriform paradise' birthed from seeds of sensations of hunger, desire, and danger—among a host of other subjects—all fertilized by a visceral, textural synaesthesia...This constant flood of diction swells the brain and excites nerve endings.”
—The Literary Review
“The most exciting book in this trio...is Sally Wen Mao's debut, Mad Honey Symposium...She learned Plath's tension: the stakes are always high—perhaps sometimes one gets a little sweaty in the heat in these lines—and when there's humor, it is of a dark kind...she's catchy in other ways: there are plenty of portable lines here, esoteric truisms that would make excellent T-shirts, tattoos, or trucker hats. I’m tempted to tattoo 'Even the thickest skin is still a membrane' on my chest.”
—Poetry Magazine
“Mao’s dexterity nearly overburdens the sensorium. She succeeds in making our world seem alien in its lushness and danger. . . . Mad Honey Symposium [is] among the strongest #debut collections of the year.”
—SCOUT
“. . .[By] juxtaposing. . . ordinary items with feral images, [Sally Wen Mao] drags the reader into a dark dance that is both disorienting and intoxicating. Her disturbing imagery and descriptions blend terror and desire in one spellbinding book that will leave you feeling its affects long after you’ve finished reading it.”
—(The) Absolute