Sally Wen Mao’s The Kingdom of Surfaces, to be released on August 1st by Gray Wolf Press, is an ambitious historical examination of the treatment of Asian people in the West, written in the wings of the Coronavirus pandemic. Mao’s third poetry collection expands her extensive creative repertoire: while her premier book of poems, Mad Honey Symposium, channels its poetic potency from images of floral and fauna, her second collection, Oculus, is a speculative tour-de-force that examines the Western response to Asian womanhood and Asian celebrity. The Kingdom of Surfaces continues the conversations in her previous poetry collections about the Western voyeurism of East Asia, the similarities between biological processes of nature and human behavior, and her literary muse Anna May Wong—however this time, Mao chooses the world of museums as the setting for her ruminations. 

The Kingdom of Surfaces opens with poems that address the heightened peril of Asian-Americans during the worst of the Coronavirus pandemic in verse that substitutes ornate, coy language with rage-filled directness. In “Batshit,” Mao writes that people “call eating dog barbaric, / but not police brutality. They hated a caged animal in a foreign country, but ignore the border camps in their own.” In Mao’s view, the exotification and demonization of Asian cultural practices so absorbs the Western consciousness that it distracts them from the evils of their own country that are perpetuated on a societal scale. In “Wet Market,” Mao grapples with Wuhan’s dual role as both her ancestral home as well as the original hotbed of Covid-19. The poem’s scattered form reifies the chaos and vibrancy of the city’s wet market. Mao writes that:

… In the wet market, I touch live snapping

turtles, frogs in vats, smell the musk of open-air

stalls You want your meat squirming and slippery, 

not the squids and king conch packed in ice

Sally Wen Mao, “Wet Market”

Mao suggests that wet markets,  far from being the anachronistic “global threat to public health” that Western pundits describe them as, function more similarly to the farmer’s markets that are already hailed in the United States as oases of fresh, local produce. In Mao’s view, the wet market, by selling food that is either alive or killed on-site, reaches into the heart of things and truly embraces the life-cycle of an organism—unlike Western culture, which is instead committed to “a body cleaved of hungers and horrors, its stench so inherently / clean…” In short, it is committed to a life of surfaces.

Surfaces permeate the entire collection as a motif. For Sally Wen Mao, her shared cultural history with other Chinese people, and in particular other Chinese women, is a somatic experience. In the poem “Solitary Generation,” Mao speaks from the perspective of an anonymous Chinese elder when she writes that “in fields of magic, my history / cannibalizes yours…my leftover daughters, freezing / your eggs in a tumblr / my bare-branched sons, fluffing / your hens for the roost…” Mao seamlessly enters the perspective of others, revealing that the trauma of a person’s cultural existence is shared by the entire community. In “Aubade with Gravel and Gold,” Mao admits that “I’m sick of speaking for women who’ve died / Their stories and their disappearances / bludgeon me in my sleep.” Later in the poem she recounts that “last night a woman from another century / entered me, and her male phantoms possessed /  me, all night I was warm, / cold and savage with their touch.” For Mao, remembering and honoring the stories of the Chinese women that came before her is an act of bodily possession.
However, the records of history function much differently in museums. In an essential sense, Mao defines museums as institutions of Western education and control whose purpose extends far beyond its record of aesthetics. The eponymous poem of the collection, “The Kingdom of Surfaces,” charts Mao’s surreal tramp through the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibit China: Through the Looking Glass as she also reflects on the book which the exhibit’s name references, Lewis Carol’s Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There. She notes that the book was published the same year as the Chinese Massacre in Los Angeles; moreover it was published one decade after the Second Opium War and one decade before the Chinese Exclusion Act. Mao writes:

If you decontextualize the history from the bowl and place it on a kitchen table, what do you have? A varnished object, whose function is to hold sugar. Sugar sweetened the ranch hand’s morning coffee, sweetened the whipping cream, the cakes and tarts. The purpose of sugar—pleasure. Sensation. What a treat. Skull, sockets, nineteen-century cane field. If you place the decorative sugar bowl in a museum exhibition, what do you get? An even brighter elevation! When a curator smiles, he gives us permission to enjoy the sugar bowl for pure aesthetic value.

Sally Wen Mao, “The Kingdom of Surfaces”

One glaring issue with the presence of Asian art in Western museums is that these arts and wares are associated with a centuries-old tradition of plundering and exploiting Asian people in order to acquire them. At the turn of the nineteenth century, the luxury tastes of the European middle-class shifted toward an obsession with Asian imports such as silks, porcelain, and lacquerware. As the British historian Maxine Berg argued in her article “In Pursuit of Luxury,” “these goods were special luxuries for Europeans: they were not the ancient or Persian luxuries of corruption and vice, the gold and rubies of the Indies. They were luxuries associated with a civilized way of life.” Moreover, Asian art (and in particular Asian interiors)  was also one of the chief inspirations of the Aesthetic Movement, which called for a retreat from the sterile aesthetics of the Industrial Age and an embrace of the sexual, non-material, and “art for art’s sake”—in short, it was a glorification of “the surface.” Both of these factors placed Asian objects in high demand; however, a consistent issue was that Europeans had few objects of their own that the Asian public was interested in.

As a result, Western nations exercised their imperial might. In the 18th century, European demand for Chinese luxury goods created a trade imbalance between the East and West that Britain desperately hoped to rectify. In order to incite Chinese demand, Britain began to cultivate opium in Bengal to sell in the Chinese black-market; the strategy reversed the Chinese trade surplus and introduced opium addiction as a serious affliction to the nation. Moreover, in 1853, the U.S. military forced Japan to open its ports to trade, aiming to end the nation’s isolationist policies. The shogunate capitulated to their demands; the prosperity of the Edo period, induced by the agricultural boom, had ended, and Japan’s military was no match for that of the United States’.  How can the West’s obsession with Asian objects be reconciled with the heartless degradation of both their economies and their people?

Mao equates the aestheticization of Asian culture at the price of its humanity, as perpetuated in the walls of the museum, with the objectification of Asian people in Western culture. In her poem “Romance of the Castle-Toppler,” Mao examines the term 倾城 , which refers both to a woman’s exceptional beauty (or “allure,” as its direct translation) and also speaks “to the subjugation of a country due to the female sex” . Fascination with womanly beauty was coupled with anxiety about the power that her beauty bestowed upon her. Continuing with the motif of surfaces, Mao writes that the castle-toppler is “a surface, a sheet. / She is imagined but never touched.” In Chinese literature, she also typically succumbs to a violent death—most famously, in “The Song of Everlasting Sorrow,” the beloved Emperor’s consort and renown beauty Yang Guifei strangled herself in front of a Buddhist shrine at the behest of her husband. 

Although not as overtly brutal, Mao suggests that the fate of Chinese women since has been similarly doomed, insofar as they are defined by their sexual utility. Once again, she turns to Anna May Wong, widely considered to be the first Chinese-American film star, to illustrate her point. In one section of “The Kingdom of Surfaces,” Mao imagines that she and Anna May Wong share a boat ride. Mao writes:

Reeling from the serpent bite, my body is covered with blue welts. These are the same welts suffered by the first Chinese immigrant women in America, Anna May says. One generation before I was born, women poured into the ports of San Francisco, and they were sold in slave auctions right on the docks. By day they toiled in factories, by night they toiled with their bodies—if they transgressed, they were branded with hot packers.

Sally Wen Mao, “The Kingdom of Surfaces”

Once again  Mao argues that historical memory is experienced somatically, such as through welts on the body—it simply cannot be captured properly in a museum where aesthetics supersede content. The sexual labels forced onto Asian women today as “temptresses” functions similarly to the commercial pressure that Anna May Wong faced to play roles in films that caricatured Asian women as “Dragon Ladies” —both are simply less graphic versions of the violence that Asian women face in society. As Mao mentioned in “Batshit,” since the pandemic an Asian woman suffered second-degree burns when someone threw acid on her while she was taking out garbage in her Brooklyn neighborhood. In another instance, a forty-year old Asian woman was pushed into the train tracks and killed. In Atlanta, six Asian women, all of them employed at Atlanta-area spas, were killed by a white man who was trying to rid himself of his porn and sex addiction. 

Sally Wen Mao’s collection The Kingdom of Surfaces is a profoundly moving reflection on what objection means for the experience of Asian womanhood. Her poems are hard-hitting, educational, and timely. Most importantly, they are a love letter to her Chinese heritage and its color, messiness, and depth—all of which cannot be captured at museums. 

S. Yarberry communicates the struggles of self-discovery and self-realization through their evocative debut poetry collection A Boy in the City. Navigating both their romantic and sexual relationships as well as their meditative interior monologue, Yarberry recreates the world in visionary verse; they offer an alternative lens through which to view our modern condition. 

Much of the collection is bolstered by their polished, and not unrecognized, literary technique: their poetry has been published in lauded journals including Adroit Journal, Lily Magazine of the Washington Post, and AGNI, andwas also featured in Queer Voices: Prose, Poetry, and Pride, published by the Minnesota Historical Press in 2019. They currently serve as Poetry Editor at The Spectacle and the Poetry Coordinator at the MFA App Review, in addition to their undergraduate teaching experience at Washington University in St. Louis and Northwestern University. 

In short, their resume is studded. I am hesitant to classify them as a young intellectual, as doing so might suggest that their poetry was pretentious, and possibly inscrutable; but I would be lying if I said that such thoughts didn’t trouble me when I first read through the collection. Yarberry opens their collection with an excerpt from The Book of Urizen by William Blake, and is peppered with references to Dante’s Inferno, the Odyssey, and, of course, other poems by Blake himself. Although I personally found their poems relatable and pleasing on aesthetic, linguistic, and intellectual levels, was that because I was raised in the same type of intellectual milieu? I remember feeling the fountain pen rolling around in my hand, as if it was the smoking gun that betrayed me. 

To be honest, I don’t know if “intellectual” poetry is necessarily a problem; I don’t even know what role poetry should play in the emotional education of the youth. We are surrounded by so many iterations of what it could be, from Rupi Kaur’s notorious “Milk and Honey” collection, to the poetry publications of celebrities such as Lana Del Rey and James Franco that many self-proclaimed intellectuals gleefully deride. On the other side of the spectrum are the poems published by literary journals, many of which read as stiff and emotionally distant despite their linguistic panache. Reading modern poetry forces readers to choose between appreciating beautiful and complex language and accessibly experiencing catharsis. What a lot of popular modern poets forget is that catharsis and self-knowledge are supposed to be difficult. This has led to my general fear that poetry is no longer a means of emotional education, but instead feeds people trite thought-bites  in order to provide them with the spiritual recognition that they are not offered in reality. 

S. Yarberry’s “Boy in the City,” is a salve for the poison of a tired dichotomy: their poems possess a strong emotional resonance, while also demonstrating care for literary technique and tradition. Their command of symbols is masterful, and their poetry style holds a steady balance between restraint and emotionality. A central theme of the collection is a struggle between animals and civilization, which manifests in the futile plight of the “boy in the city”: in a world where you are trying to locate your identity, what can you do to protect yourself from the forces that attempt to subject you to its order? 

“I move through the city — / an eternal disruption,” Yarberry writes in their poem “Requiem Circuit.” 

The relationship between animals and urbanity is also examined,  including in “Terminal Theater,” my favorite poem in the collection. Yarberry writes, “…memory spills / like motor oil on the driveway. / an antelope walks across / the bright green field / of my mind…” Yarberry’s contrast of different physical planes demonstrates the narrator’s double life as both belonging to the city while also seeing themself as fundamentally alienated from it, heralding from a universe that is unstructured, uncomplicated—possibly untainted. The narrator’s plight, however, is frustrated again in this poem as in the rest: they write: “…I’m in the gutter. / The city scoffs at me! I burst at the seams.”

Yarberry also positions animals in relation to death, as either killing, or being killed, or benefitting from the killing. In “Cormorants,” “cormorants walk the beach.” In “The Wolves,” the narrator opens their eyes and sees “…Two rabbits, I notice, / two squirrels, me doubled, then doubled again…Wolves come into view. What do they want? They want me. I just know it.” In “Eminence,” “Racoons hunted. Vultures circled some unknown tragedy.” In “The Orchard,” “A fruit fly haunts at the window.” Deers appear periodically, alive in the beginning of the collection and dead at the end: although a “deer stood at the other side of the spring” in “Eminence,” they reappear as roadkill in “Island of Calypso.” Beyond the terrors of the city, other animals emerge as potential threats to the narrator that harken danger, displacement, and death. 

In the last line of the entire collection, Yarberry states that “it is nothing special to not want to be hurt.” This double negative intrigues me. To me, this confusing  language structure captures the complexity of the narrator’s plight. To express their desires in a straight-forward manner would deny that their realization is inevitably thorny, disappointing, and even futile, as evidenced in the events of the preceding poems. In the collection as a whole, complicated and contradictory language reflects a complicated and contradictory social reality. 

This poetry collection touched me more deeply than any has for a long time. It is complex and sincere, channeling the author’s millenial ennui into a stunning commentary on life as a queer individual in our hyper-calculated, hyper-suveilled modern world. Yarberry brings an articulate and unique voice to the poetry scene, and I am excited to read more of their writing in the future.