... stunning ... neon and imaginative language anchored in historical and cultural questions of representation, othering, inclusion and exclusion ... Mao is doing the necessary work of interrogating the two-dimensionality of screens, its tendency to flatten the representation of those who, in real life, are already flattened in society: minorities and women ... Mao is clever in connecting this spectacle to the digital age, and the ways that constant access to the sight of someone can lead to an absence, rather than a presence – a ghostly emptiness ... These lovely questions are the Pandora’s boxes Mao’s Oculus has ambitiously opened and exploring them with Mao’s intelligent guidance is a gift itself.
Whether wayward spirit or nefarious satyr, Mao’s narrators and characters inhabit the sense of oculus as eye-opening, a transformative door ... Mao’s descriptions are precise and surreal, a next phase of evolution ... An expansive book, but each poem bears careful reading.
Two things are striking about this debut collection. The first is the amount of research that Mao has undertaken to write about such diverse subjects as the honey badger, Venus flytrap, Xenophon, and the Trinidad Scorpion, while also exploring personal states of consciousness ... I admire the defiant voice running throughout both of Mao’s books, and the degree to which she has raised the stakes in Oculus ... Mao never loses touch with what W.E. B. Dubois, in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), called 'Double Consciousness,' the awareness that one’s identity is fractured and consists of multiple parts, and the difficulty, if not impossibility, of unifying them. It is to Mao’s credit that she never seeks refuge in the single identity, no matter what comfort it promises, because she knows it limits her in ways that she finds unacceptable.
These poems are haunted by images of human faces staring out from all kinds of screens, faces that are themselves screens upon which the world projects its fantasies and anxieties ... The poems in Oculus are rangy, protean, contradictory. They offer an alternative to the selfie, that static reduction of a person to her most photogenic poses ... Contemporary poetry is full of scrupulously researched, rather lifeless 'project' books; a lesser poet than Mao might have stuck to the historical Wong, out of some misplaced sense of fealty or respect. But Mao’s fabricated Wong is a wild creation...
... 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.
Mao’s poems are front-loaded with detail, flashing handfuls of hot topics, aesthetic trends and buzzwords that capture the attention of a particular audience (millennials and their apologists) just enough to create some interpretive distance between the reader and the more sinister forces at work underneath their poetic Instagram filter ... brimming with information ... the poems in Mao’s collection execute a deft two-punch maneuver. They first generate internal spectacle on the line, distracting from their local plot with flashy words and glittering gadgetry. Then, with this in mind, Oculus as a whole starts to look like spectacle, unveiling the artistic distance between the poetry and the very real, very serious topics and themes it comments on (the text and the notes, if you will). Mao’s poems don’t just comment on spectacle — they literally perform it, unveiling its subtle machinery and complicated network of repercussions right there, right on the page.
By giving voice to, composing odes for, or revising [Chinese] figures, Mao creates a poignant, albeit cautious, optimism ... Oculus is a deftly structured volume of hauntingly perceptive poems, peering backward through the 20th century while penetrating our contemporary moment. It’s an homage to pioneering Chinese Americans and an indictment of Asian representation in American culture, which never for a moment shies away from the difficult tasks of taking on race and history and technology all at once, but confidently looks them right in the eye, unblinking.
In her stunning second collection, Mao stages a searing ventriloquy act, inhabiting a very specific group of otherwise voiceless speakers: Asian and Asian American woman who have been stereotyped and reduced to cliché in films, photographs, and TV shows ... Throughout, Mao seeks to correct the mistakes the camera encourages the viewer to make...
Mao employs a range of forms, from compact couplets and tercets to extended, multi-sectioned meditations. With sharp wit and linguistic brio, these poems reanimate and revitalize historical and fictional characters—primarily women of color—whose stories have long been silence ... an act of deep empathy and care ... The poems in Oculus are acts of resistance and protection, but they also serve as an invitation, a call to gathering ... In speaking of the resistance, imagination, and empathy that propel these poems, I do not mean to gloss over Mao’s linguistic inventiveness and often thrillingly insightful diction. The most startling and pleasurable moments arise from her interrogation of how technology mediates bodily experience.
... ambitious ... has a stunning sequence of poems in the voice of Anna May Wong ... heartbreaking and unforgettable poems ... a short but intensive course on the different and necessary technologies of dismantling the omnivorous eye.
What’s so compelling about Mao’s Asian American futurism is that it employs figures of the past like Afong Moy, the first Chinese woman to travel to the United States, and Anna May Wong, the first Chinese American film actress, to deliver anachronistic dramatic monologues that speak to their time, ours, and the future ... Mao’s use of line breaks charges her poems with a scathingly interrogative subtext ... By embracing futurism, by writing it, Mao suggests that things can be changed so that each of her speakers recognizes herself in the narrative.
[Sally Wen Mao] crafts an immense undertaking with Oculus, weaving together contemplations of contemporary media, race, technology, loneliness, womanhood and other achingly modern and timely elements, all achieving perfect cohesion within the book ... Certain themes and motifs run through Oculus like a poetic river ... What I love most about Mao’s verse is its sense of contemplative isolation and detachment ... there is a current running beneath every poem in this collection that begs something of the reader: our reverie, perhaps, or even our very hearts.
Sally Wen Mao’s collection Oculus sets out to examine the connections between the gaze and how technology has blurred the definition of sight, making it possible to see without truly seeing ... Creating a hybrid diary-critique in the voice of Anna May Wong, Mao shows the past is not antique or irrelevant, but an ongoing excavation that is always revealing new layers ... a sensorial and emotional overload that will disturb the reader in provocative ways.
In Oculus, Mao demonstrates how the hyper-visibility produced by and through technology is often as effective a force for the Imperial gaze to 'unsee' or 'missee' non-white bodies as ignoring them altogether ... One of the most compelling complications in Mao’s examination of race and invisibility is that as she examines the hyper-visibility’s possible violences, she also generates a conversation about links between race, technology, and time ... Mao allows her speakers to exist in paradox. The images convey tragedy and horror as they are sadistically viewed and exploited. Yet by recording death in this way, by rendering it hyper-visible and aestheticized, the woman leaves behind an ongoing performance of her own absence ... In addition to its critical visions, much of the heart of this collection lies here, in gestures of solidarity through shadow, in the possibility that women of color can defy time and script to write to and for each other.
