*FINALIST FOR THE 2023 MAYA ANGELOU BOOK AWARD * A virtuosic new poetry collection from Sally Wen Mao, "a consistently inspiring and exciting voice" (Morgan Parker) 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
