Mad honey symposium

Linguistically dexterous and formally astute, Mao's tight and textured debut conjures an absurd, lush, occasionally poisonous world and the ravenous humans and animals that travel through it. "Ask the person in the seat beside,/ Where is this place to you?// All your life// -a sunrise?... fata morgana?... an incubation?" Her poems find their sources in news clippings, Greek and Roman history, and Chinese myths, and they formally and conceptually play on field notes, lessons, travelogues, inventories, and case studies without losing their rich, deliberate emotionality and musicality. "I kissed him goodbye// on the stone rotunda, follicles/ stinging, skin molting like a lizard's,/ & how I wanted to run." The natural world regularly doubles as an emotional inner realm for the poems' speakers, and this conflation is often fascinatingly at odds with itself: "When resources run out, don't sit there and behave./ Abandon hive. If the hornet breaks the heat net,// save yourself. Abandon yen. Abandon majesty./ Spit out the light because it sears you so." With echoes of Gluck and Plath, Mao generates stunning landscapes where the flora and fauna reflect her presence and strength of voice. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

When Mao opens an early poem in this debut collection with the line, "There is no real love in the apiary," readers know what to expect. This is not a collection about honey-sweet affection but the fierceness and brutality of desire: "I despised softness/...I wanted to disperse like creosote/ in water....So entered sex." Early on we encounter a honey badger, an animal that fearlessly ventures into hives and holes to eat honey and snakes; it's gashed and slashed for its courageous longing, but "A broken badger is not a sad thing." Later, the poet declares, "We've kissed poison flowers and retched/ it all but we're hungry still." Mao thus writes with exuberant, implacable physicality, using the animal world (particularly bees) to show us our own animal passions. We try to build bridges-"Once, I strung a wire/ from my roof to yours. I walked that steel// thread with no parachute, just an umbrella"-but life is always a tightrope walk. VERDICT Certainly relentless and -offering the occasional disassociated line, this is never-theless blistering poetry that reveals an uncompromising imagination. For serious readers now and for everyone to watch in the future.-Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.