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hyperdontiia 's review for:
Oculus: Poems
by Sally Wen Mao
The good shit. Anna May Wong truly stars in this volume, with tight prose and a tight central idea. I think most of the poems do a good job circling this, though I did get in a prolonged argument on if the addition of fictional characters to the repertoire did a good job advancing themes of the volume proper. I'm going to go with a tentative "yeah makes sense towards the end to move from the derealized into the unreal I just can't take Lavender Town poems seriously because I think the aesthetic is less serious than the volume has been thus far, by a margin". The collection besides that does a good job balancing hard cultural subjects, including objectification, ornamentalism, and suicide. There's an aesthetic graininess about the poems, like low-quality footage, that makes them vividly colorful and sometimes less focused on image than idea-- I think it's in the way the details themselves are set up. It's interesting. So is the ability to endlessly remix, keeping each Anna May Wong poem fresh even as they number higher and higher. There's an echo to the whole volume, which adds to the haunting quality. (There are... a lot of ghosts here.) Mao has a lot of talent on display, with the volume climaxing at the final poem's reclaimed space: "if I can recognize / her face under this tunnel of endless shadows / … then I am not a stranger here."