Introduction: Sally Wen Mao

Abstract

IntroductionSally Wen Mao Ocean Vuong (bio) Sally Wen Mao is the author of Mad Honey Symposium (Alice James Books), the winner of the 2012 Kinereth Gensler Award, a Poets & Writers Top Ten Debut of 2014, and a Publishers Weekly Top Ten Anticipated Pick. Her second book, Oculus, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2019. Her work has also won a Pushcart Prize and has been anthologized in The Best American Poetry. The recipient of fellowships and scholarships from Kundiman, Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Jerome Foundation, Hedgebrook, Vermont Studio Center, Saltonstall Foundation, and the prestigious 2016 Cullman Center at the New York Public Library, Mao has taught Creative Writing as a Visiting Professor at Cornell University, Hunter College, and the National University of Singapore, among others. Currently she resides in Washington, DC, as the 2018 Jenny McKean Moore Writer-in-Washington at George Washington University. Sally Wen Mao's interdisciplinary work—whether it be essays, poems, fiction, or painting and drawing—are embodied interrogations of the brutal and repressive architectures of patriarchal silencing. Mao's poems, richly informed by science, history, the natural world, Anna Mae Wong, and the oft-forgotten facts of cultural and historic upheaval, drive their power from the fulcrum of alterity. Hers is a poetics of breaching—not to merely disrupt for the sake of the new, but to recalibrate and suggest new hierarchies from which to live and feel by. They work as both scalpel and flood, poems of brooded, subtle syntax that build and accrue toward inevitable and stifling ferocity. They challenge our culture's often too-calcified notions of love and romance, power and failure, and dismantle the belief that certainty is infallible strength. Mao's work reclaims for itself an acidic possibility, corrosive to monuments of thought that never held the othered female body the way her very poems do: how they erect themselves, like bones, according to a life's desire to bend, stand, and dance on its own terms, both [End Page 804] out of joy as well as to keep from falling. "Live," she writes, "as if kindness is a hoax." And it is through this very upending of conventional values that we see the world anew—and demand of it a truth perhaps even words themselves cannot promise: yet another world—but in this one. Ultimately, here is a body of work that not only insists on its own resurrection, but then, refusing the very ground it arrives at, has chosen instead, like the perishable yet fearless insects she writes of, its own flight—its own impossibly real and wildly achieved altitudes. [End Page 805] Ocean Vuong ocean vuong is the author of Night Sky with Exit Wounds and the debut novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous. His writings have been featured in The Atlantic, The Nation, New Yorker, and American Poetry Review. Born in Saigon, Vietnam, he lives in western Massachusetts, where he serves as an assistant professor at UMass Amherst. Copyright © 2018 The Massachusetts Review, Inc.