In a series of concrete poems shaped like vases, Mao excavates the underbelly of the long history of, and fetishization for, porcelain. Elsewhere she recounts the tyranny of Karens (“A white woman feigns distress,/ calls the cops/ On a black man, a bird-/ watcher“); exposes the dark facts of how silk is made and traded; and, most urgently, revisits her childhood memories of the City of Wuhan (“my birthplace”), and recalls the tides of racism directed at Chinese people during the pandemic years: “security camera footage showed a sixty-five-year-old woman shoved, punched, and kicking in front of 360 West 43rd Street.” A poem about a long-ago sexual assault joins a lamenting chorus that grieves millennia of pillaging: “my feelings were leaves/ that bypassed everyone and buried me.”
Mao’s sentences here are more straightforward than in her two previous books, which I loved for their careful eye and quiet roiling. In The Kingdom of Surfaces, the anger bubbles over, is evident everywhere, and yet these poems have a kind of conversational intimacy that is new to Mao, as if recent events have led her to drop some of the pretense and protection of style. She distills all the ugliness of these years, and the many years before, down to its grim essence: “But beauty is political. But beauty is political. But beauty is political.”
Pig by Sam Sax
For Jews, pork is terefah, forbidden food — and, in this book, with a surprisingly light touch, Sam Sax makes of the pig a powerful, all purpose symbol. It becomes an injunction to search oneself, in rather informal and conversational terms, for hedging pathways forward: “do your work with care, as i have tried & failed here.”
Though every poem involves a pig somehow (as food, as a slur, as a colloquialism for a police officer, as an Animal Farm fascist, as a quizzical farm animal, as Wilbur, the pig saved by language), this one-species menagerie doesn’t feel like a conceit. Sometimes the pig is the poem’s stated subject, but more often it waddles in from the side, a verbal tick, a reminder that a shared set of concerns is pulling on these poems. Each poem needs its pig, and each pig is different so each poem is different. In a way, Sax could write this book about anything and he even says as much: “what would i learn if i were to write/ this book on an entirely different subject:/ antique clock repair, the sex lives of astronomers, joy.”