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About The Kingdom of Surfaces
In The Kingdom of Surfaces, award-winning poet Sally Wen Mao examines art and history—especially the provenance of objects such as porcelain, silk, and pearls—to frame an important conversation on beauty, empire, commodification, and violence. In lyric poems and wide-ranging sequences, Mao interrogates gendered expressions such as the contemporary “leftover women,” which denotes unmarried women, and the historical “castle-toppler,” a term used to describe a concubine whose beauty ruins an emperor and his empire. These poems also explore the permeability of object and subject through the history of Chinese women in America, labor practices around the silk loom, and the ongoing violence against Asian people during the COVID-19 pandemic.
At its heart, The Kingdom of Surfaces imagines the poet wandering into a Western fantasy, which covets, imitates, and appropriates Chinese aesthetics via Chinamania and the nineteenth-century Aesthetic movement, while perpetuating state violence upon actual lives. The title poem is a speculative recasting of “Through the Looking-Glass,” set in a surreal topsy-turvy version of the China-themed 2015 Metropolitan Museum of Art Gala. The Kingdom of Surfaces is a brilliantly conceived call for those who recognize the horrors of American exceptionalism to topple the empire that values capital over lives and power over liberation.
Sally Wen Mao is the author of The Kingdom of Surfaces (Graywolf, 2023), and the forthcoming debut story collection Ninetails (Penguin Books, 2024). She is also the author of the poetry collections Mad Honey Symposium (Alice James Books, 2014) and Oculus (Graywolf Press, 2019), which was a finalist for the 2020 Los Angeles Book Prize in Poetry. Her poems are published in The Paris Review, The Best American Poetry 2013 and 2021, The Washington Post, Harpers Bazaar, The Kenyon Review, and A Public Space, among others, and her fiction is published in The Georgia Review and Indiana Review. The recipient of an National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Cullman fellowship at the New York Public Library, a Shearing fellowship at the Black Mountain Institute, and two Pushcart Prizes, Mao lives and teaches in New York City.
Cathy Linh Che is a Vietnamese American writer and multidisciplinary artist. She is the author of Split (Alice James Books), winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize, the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the Best Poetry Book Award from the Association of Asian American Studies, the co-author, with Kyle Lucia Wu, of the children’s book An Asian American A to Z: a Children’s Guide to Our History (Haymarket Books), which will be published in May 2023, and the chaplet Zombie Apocalypse Now: The Walking Dead (Belladonna*).