Poetry critic Dan Chiasson creates gorgeous quasi-surreal verbal combines embedded with glittering fragments of quotation. His “Blank Looks,” a review of Sally Wen Mao’s Oculus, in this week’s issue, contains several of them:
Wong says that, because she almost never got to kiss the romantic lead, “I had to marry / my own cinematic death,” like the character she played in “The Toll of the Sea,” a 1922 film inspired by “Madame Butterfly”—and not so unlike the Instagrammed woman, nearly a century later.
In this world, green stands for both escape and annihilation, red for both peril and relief. But in the poem new colors quickly emerge: first white, “the color of erasure,” then blue, which stands for “the ocean that drowns the liars,” “the shore where the girl keeps living,” and the place where she awakens, “prismatic, childless, free.”
But Mao’s fabricated Wong is a wild creation: she has a “time machine” and rides a “comet, / to the future,” where she makes out with Bruce Lee and hangs around the set of “Chungking Express,” yet she’s also shunted into minor roles in “The Last Samurai,” “Kill Bill,” and “Memoirs of a Geisha.”
Mao evokes the performance under the big skylight, “through which all fears still burned,” and the audience watching “without cameras / except our eyes and faces.”
Chiasson is a critic-collagist. He has a knack for selecting vivid bits from poems and piecing them into his own meaning-making constructions. I enjoy his work immensely.
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