The Kingdom of Surfaces
Graywolf Press, August 1st 2023
ISBN: 9781644452370
Order:
A Finalist for the 2023 Maya Angelou Book Award
A New York Public Library Best Book of 2023
An Electric Literature Best Poetry Collection of 2023
A Poetry Question Best Poetry Collection of 2023
Description:
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.
112 pages, Paperback
Expected publication August 1, 2023
“Mao’s third collection probes the world of art to ask how we decide what is beautiful or important, and challenges us to consider the ways culture is shaped by empire and politics.”
“An intimate family of poems, with gut-punch phrasings and tender lines that will stick to you like a bur.”
“Through poems of profound complexity, in the blending of factual accounts with the sometimes surreal, often sublime, imaginings of the speaker, a finely wrought structure of proof and interrogation, vulnerability, power and, especially, of beauty emerges. The book itself becomes the vessel, complex and strange, yet strong enough to contain all the evidence required to hold history accountable.”
“The poet trains her mythopoetic gaze on the arts of China—especially silk and porcelain...Postcolonial critique meets VR fantasy in the book’s centerpiece: an extended, rapturous encounter with the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2015 exhibit...Mao brandishes her own tenacious imagination.”
“Lineage is a mainstay of The Kingdom of Surfaces, as when Mao writes elsewhere of how a narrator, perpetually coughing as a child, was given yellow loquats as a child to calm the sickness...So many gorgeous, sharp lines in this book that often reveal the pain beneath. A stirring collection.”
