RaveLos Angeles Review of BooksIn her debut volume of poetry, Jackie Wang presents a collection of poems interpreting the surreal cinema of dreams ... Each poem is a miniature world of the familiar made strange, calibrated to the uncanny tempos and extravagant imagery of a lucid dream ...These poems of intense longing articulate the dream as a space of social planning at the end of the world ... Wang’s poems center on the sociality of dreams, not only the shattering tenderness of being with others, but also dreaming as a response to endless crisis: techno-dystopian surveillance, policing and prisons, the threat of climate change and total war, supercharged diseases, the brutal exhaustions of racial capitalism ... Wang’s focus in The Sunflower on the social promise of queer eros and the role of sexuality in building radical communities, as well as her capacity for warm absurdism and comedy, are welcome demonstrations of her flexibility as a writer and thinker ... Riffing on the symbolic resonances of the sunflower, Wang offers poetry as method for social invention.
Tina Chang
PositiveLos Angeles Review of BooksHybrida reminds us of a shared responsibility to protect the most vulnerable and to cherish bodies as fragile and wondrous. Many of the poems grieve relatively recent and high-profile losses of somebody’s child, including Michael Brown in the poems \'Creation Myth\' and \'Timeline for a Body: 4 Hours, 6 Bullets.\' ... Chang weaves a bright gold thread of resistance within these entangled narratives ... Hybrida expresses discontent with ...inherited forms, with our impoverished language for understanding identity and our famished stories of the body. Seeking out the role that poetry might play in reimagining identity, heredity, and family, these works attempt to tell new stories of kinship, especially the relationships between mothers and their children ... Chang’s explorations of motherhood are self-reflective, fiercely loving, and necessarily uncertain ... What is the form protection should take? Could take? Hybrida brings a poet’s careful stewardship of language to the mobilization of moral conscience.
Sally Wen Mao
PositiveThe Los Angeles Review of Books... dreams in the luminous glow of the screen, it lusts after modern reflective surfaces, and it grazes the slick, desirable textures of late capitalism ... At her most oneiric, Mao crafts fantastic dreams of a technophilic screen ... As the Guggenheim’s interior gently, but firmly, guides the visitor through a particular vision of modernist and contemporary art, Mao’s Oculus offers an alternative art historical whorl, creating her own procession of cross-racial solidarity and beauty.
