Oculus

Oculus Poems

Sally Wen Mao2019
A brilliant second collection by Sally Wen Mao on the violence of the spectacle—starring the film legend Anna May Wong In Oculus, Sally Wen Mao explores exile not just as a matter of distance and displacement but as a migration through time and a reckoning with technology. The title poem follows a nineteen-year-old girl in Shanghai who uploaded her suicide onto Instagram. Other poems cross into animated worlds, examine robot culture, and haunt a necropolis for electronic waste. A fascinating sequence spanning the collection speaks in the voice of the international icon and first Chinese American movie star Anna May Wong, who travels through the history of cinema with a time machine, even past her death and into the future of film, where she finds she has no progeny. With a speculative imagination and a sharpened wit, Mao powerfully confronts the paradoxes of seeing and being seen, the intimacies made possible and ruined by the screen, and the many roles and representations that women of color are made to endure in order to survive a culture that seeks to consume them.
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Reviews

Photo of elif sinem
elif sinem@prism
5 stars
May 23, 2022

What this poetry collection does so well throughout the whole thing is portray the unique sense of urban / technological alienization in a way I've never read before. Sally Wen Mao also connects this feeling to experienced of being a racial minority and the solidarity that forms with other racial minorities. And the compositions were all immaculate, all amazing. A lot of words to say that this is So good.

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Lis@seagull
5 stars
Mar 16, 2022

i just read this whole thing out loud to myself as the best kind of treat! it's so good. sonically, too, it makes a huge difference to really listen to it

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cg@cataphora
5 stars
Jan 10, 2024
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alma@phototropism
3 stars
Jan 2, 2023
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雪 xue@snow
3 stars
Jul 25, 2022
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Kevin Bertolero@kevin_bertolero
4 stars
Mar 4, 2022
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s.@mythweaver
5 stars
Dec 13, 2021
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Ezra Alie@ezraa
4 stars
Oct 1, 2021