NINETAILS
“A sumptuous and lively collection, leaping from story to story in much the same way a fox does—surprisingly, gracefully, and with impressive aim. I loved this book.”
—Kelly Link, Pulitzer Prize finalist and bestselling author of Get in Trouble and The Book of Love
“What I love most about Ninetails is its fierce allegiance to underdogs of all kinds, its careful and myriad empathy for its characters, but also its pure and artisanal delight in language and fictive possibilities. It marks, to my mind, the beginning of a poet’s long and potent exploration in literature’s most capacious genre. And it’s a welcomed sight to see.”
—Ocean Vuong, New York Times bestselling author of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and Time Is a Mother
“With this first collection of deft and poignant stories, Sally Wen Mao continues to prove herself as one of the most fascinating and versatile writers of her generation.”
—Dave Eggers, New York Times bestselling author of The Eyes and the Impossible and The Every
“Ninetails is a spirited modern fairy tale that takes cues from history, mythology, headline news, dating apps, and Mao’s gift for sly observation. This is an exploration of the animal magic within the feminine, written with ardor and ambition.”
—C Pam Zhang, author of Land of Milk and Honey
“With Ninetails, Mao weaves a beguiling and epic paean to the power of the feminine. Lyrical and virtuosic, with a sly sense of humor, this collection features a colorful and unforgettable cast of characters, from love dolls to dancers to translators to witches. A bewitching fiction debut as magical and shape-shifting as the fox spirit herself.”
—Gina Chung, author of Sea Change and Green Frog
“Fiercely imaginative and nourished by a wild subterranean river of magic, folklore, and futuristic myth, Sally Wen Mao’s Ninetails is a beguiling book and one that challenges the reader to conjure strange new modes of subverting oppression. Long a luminary of the poetry world, Sally Wen Mao proves here that she is an unstoppable, incandescent force in prose as well.”
—Alexandra Kleeman, author of Something New Under the Sun
“[A] well-constructed debut collection that takes its name from the nine tails of the hulijing, a mythological female fox spirit…these smart, fabulist pieces confirm Mao’s reputation as a voice to be reckoned with.”
—Publishers Weekly
THE KINGDOM OF SURFACES
“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.”
—The New York Times
“An intimate family of poems, with gut-punch phrasings and tender lines that will stick to you like a bur.”
—Hyperallergic
“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.”
—The Millions
“An incisive examination into the Western gaze…a truly brilliant collection which takes us on a deep, fantastic journey and awakens a profound yearning…both a reckoning and a reclamation, whose poems are scalpels that carve themselves into you. To truly empathize, you first must bleed.”
—Electric Literature
“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.”
—Allisa Cherry, West Trade Review
“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.”
—Publishers Weekly
OCULUS
“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
“Hauntingly perceptive…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.”
—Vulture
“Whether wayward spirit or nefarious satyr, Mao’s narrators and characters inhabit the sense of oculus as eye-opening, a transformative door…. Mao’s descriptions are precise and surreal, a next phase of evolution…. An expansive book, but each poem bears careful reading.”
—The Millions
“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
“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 kaleidoscopic verse scrutinizes our obsession with onscreen spectacles—and includes a tour de force sequence that imagines silent-film actress Anna May Wong time-traveling.”
—O, The Oprah Magazine
“Sally Wen Mao’s poetry is at once speculative, sharp, lush, and precise…. Oculus tackles distance and exile, technology and time—several poems are told through the filter of a time-traveling Anna May Wong, the first Chinese American film star, which is all I needed to hear to zoom through space and time wherever she asks me to.”
—Literary Hub
“Reading Oculus is like being given the gift of sight…the possibility of being restored to who we could be, and who we could be next.”
—Alexander Chee, bestselling author of The Queen of the Night
MAD HONEY SYMPOSIUM
“Linguistically dexterous and formally astute, Mao’s tight and textured debut 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, National Book Award–winning author of Lighthead
“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 effects long after you’ve finished reading it.”
—Absolute magazine