The Kingdom of Surfaces: Poems - Softcover

Mao, Sally Wen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1644452375 ISBN 13: 9781644452370

Verlag: Graywolf Press, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

*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.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Sally Wen Mao is the author of two previous poetry collections, Mad Honey Symposium and Oculus, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A former fellow at the New York Public Library Cullman Center, she lives in New York City.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Graywolf Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2023
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1644452375
• ISBN 13: 9781644452370
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 126
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Macmillan Publishers International Limited; generalproductsafety@macmillan.com; ; (1st Floor, The Liffey Trust Centre, 117-126 Sheriff Street Upper, Dublin 1; Dublin; Irland