The author of Oculus: Poems comes to DC on Thurs., Jan. 24th, at 7PM.
Mao’s second collection uses history, film, and time travel to examine how Asian women have been by turns erased, fetishized, and commodified in Western culture—while seldom being seen for themselves. The unsettling title poem meditates on a Shanghai woman who uploaded her suicide to Instagram, while another looks back to 1834, evoking Afong Moy, the first Chinese woman in America. In a tour de force sequence on Anna May Wong, the first Chinese-American movie star, Mao shows how little things have changed between 1937, when Wong was denied the role of O-Lan in The Good Earth, and 2017, when Scarlett Johansson played Motoko Kusanagi in Ghost in the Shell. Mao, author of Mad Honey Symposium and the 2017-18 Jenny McKean Moore Writer-in-Residence at George Washington, will be in conversation with Shaheen Qureshi, a poet, teacher, and literary agent with Capital Talent Agency.
At Politics and Prose at the Wharf, 70 District Square, SW, Washington, DC. Click here for info.
