Like Sylvia Plath's poems, these visionary poems are not only astute
records of experience, they are themselves dazzling, verbal experiences.
Worldly, wily, wise: Mad Honey Symposium is an extraordinary
debut.--Terrance Hayes
[Mad Honey Symposium] has all the delicacy of [Mao's] earlier
writing--but now there's also a gritty, world-wise sense of humor that
gives her work heavyweight swagger.--Dave Eggers
Mad Honey Symposium buzzes with lush sound and sharp imagery, creating
a vivid natural world that's constantly in flux. From Venus flytraps to
mad honey eaters, badgers to empowered outsiders, Sally Wen Mao's poems
inhabit the precarious space between the vulnerable and the
ferocious--how thin that line is, how breakable--with wonder and verve.
From Valentine for a Flytrap:
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .There's voltage
in your flowers--mulch skeins, armory
for cunning loves. Your mouth pins every sticky
body, swallowing iridescence, digesting
light. Venus, let me swim in your solarium.
Venus, take me in your summer gown.
Sally Wen Mao was born in Wuhan, China, and grew up in Boston and
the Bay Area. She is a Kundiman fellow and 826 Valencia Young Author's
Scholar. Her poetry is published or forthcoming in Colorado Review,
Gulf Coast, Hayden's Ferry Review, Indiana Review, Passages
North, Quarterly West, and West Branch, among others. She holds a
BA from Carnegie Mellon University and an MFA from Cornell University,
where she's currently a lecturer.
