Freedom Teaching by Matthew Kincaid

  Matthew Kincaid asks teachers a powerful question: “Do we believe that our students deserve to be in anti-racist environments 10% of the time? 20%? 50%? What percentage of racist policy is it okay for a student of colour to have to navigate on a daily basis?”

He follows it up with an even more powerful question: “What percentage of racist / oppressive policies are we comfortable with students existing in on a daily basis? Is the answer still truly zero?”

I find these two question sets highly provocative. For the first set, Kincaid points to the obvious answer: “in an ideal world, [it] would be 0%” while recognizing that “that is not the case.” The second question points to a fundamental disconnect between our ideals and practicality. While our students deserve to be in anti-racist environments 100%, nonetheless there’s a level teachers are able to accept for the sake of the system; it’s not complacency, necessarily, but there are a number of engrained practices that go unchallenged for a number of reasons.

This is where Matthew Kincaid’s Freedom Teaching comes in. In the book, Kincaid elucidates a liberatory philosophy that strives to make the educational world a more equitable place. I found the book to be thoughtful and empowering and Kincaid addresses a number of concerns that I am still grappling with, offering a framework within which to work. The book offers a balance between offering principles of freedom teaching while recognizing that the individual context of particular schools will have an impact on how the principles are executed.

Kincaid offers the following five tenets of freedom teaching and the book explores how to achieve these different ambitions:

1. Maintain hope that is radical.

2. It isn’t rigorous if it isn’t relevant.

3. Free minds, free kids.

4. Trouble doesn’t teach.

5. Cultivate a classroom that values cultural wealth.

I think that #1 can be a particular challenge, given the current context in which we exist. The government is underfunding public schools out of existence. Artificial Intelligence systems are eroding our relationship to truth and imposing a hegemonic perspective of so-called reality. Politicians are engaging in corruption with impunity. Social media is sapping the uniqueness of kids. There is a lot to find troubling, so having the first tenant be to maintain hope is both a necessary precondition and the kind of thing that can only be achieved through a leap of faith.

The second tenet, “It isn’t rigorous if it isn’t relevant” hits like a suckerpunch to the gut. I think about all of the so-called rigour I was subjected to as a student, and while I don’t regret it, I do wonder why reading six books instead of four and writing three essays instead of two is seen as “rigour.” The deeper point that Kincaid is making here, to me, is that being “rigorous” (i.e. challenging) for the sake of adding challenge is not the same as being rigorous by delving deeply into content that is truly meaningful to students. Kincaid adds to the discussion with more detail. He sees rigour and investment as working hand in hand: “Students are less likely to engage in rigorous tasks that they are not invested in, and tasks that are rigorous, that don’t promote investment, probably aren’t meaningful tasks.” As much as I hate having to justify the value of English as a discipline, it is worth considering how to get students invested in developing their writing skills. Whether that’s the content or the end-goal, there needs to be some reason for students to get invested. 

In terms of #3 and #4, I think we are in a particularly reactionary climate wherein the response to children misbehaving is to resort to more policing. By freeing students’ minds to explore and question, we enable their ongoing success in navigating and challenging societal structures. All of this also leads towards cultivating a classroom that values cultural wealth, where a teacher’s role is not to impose a particular view of how to best navigate our lives, but instead to co-create with the communities in which we operate. A noble goal, indeed.

Ultimately, these tenets have the goal to “create educational environments that liberate students and in turn enhance their ability to make choices that give them control over critical elements in their lives.” I think it would be uncontroversial to accept this as a worthwhile pursuit. If our education isn’t assisting students towards being agents of change in their own lives, what is our purpose, exactly?

As I mentioned, Kincaid makes the case that “freedom teaching requires investment in both theory and practice.” Indeed, it is “about finding the intersection between theory and practice.” The author gives a caution for the book: “Using this text to provide a theoretical framework without engaging in the practice of employing the techniques likely won’t yield the results you want. Engaging solely in the practices without internalizing the theory also will yield incomplete results.” I think this is one that gets challenging for people in the teaching world. We are all so busy, so exhausted. We want to be told “do this” and we’ll do it and fix the world. But, the work is complex and requires examining how our particular practices need to be thoughtfully adjusted in response to the context. As Kincaid points out, “One of the reasons why anti-racism initiatives in schools fail to gain continued momentum is because people find themselves so deep in the theory that they don’t know how to apply it in a practical setting. On the other hand, there are people who [adopt a] three-step guide on how to achieve equity without fully understanding the deep and nuanced theory that provides the foundation for those practices.” I’d like to think I’m somewhere in the middle, but if I truly reflect, I’m more on the theoretical side and still need practice actually acting.

Here’s the other major piece that I think Kincaid has identified in a particularly poignant way. One of the things I’ve seen is people enacting performative change and taking credit for how much they’ve made a difference—but maybe unjustly so. Kincaid writes that in his work with schools, “one of the most difficult barriers to dismantle is the barrier of performative change.” He makes the case that a school might eliminate a racist policy without replacing it with an anti-racist one. He gives a great example here where “a teacher changes the names on their word problems to be culturally affirming, but doesn’t shift their pedagogical approach in the classroom.” I’ve witnessed this kind of thing first hand. As we work to select books that are culturally affirming (i.e. change the content), we make no adjustments to what we do with those texts: we still impose, generally, a prescriptive structure of how to write, what to write, what to write about—all under the pretense of being “academic” and “objective” without valuing individual student voice. Changing the content without changing the form still serves to replicate the structures that are leading to undeserving students. Kincaid elaborates that “a school district undergoes anti-racism training, but does little to shift the policies that incubate racism.” When this happens, the change is superficial—”the very changes that we are championing can actually just reaffirm the status quo.” I couldn’t begin to list the number of so-called changes that have had this effect. The solution, Kincaid writes, is that “if we are going to invest the time, energy, and resources to freedom teach, we have to be committed to doing it all the way. If we are going to be committed to doing it all the way, we first have to train ourselves to believe in, and hope radically for, change.”

In trying to accomplish a truly revolutionary approach to education, there are a number of limiting beliefs that Kincaid addresses. One thing that I hear from teachers—and society at large—is that students need to be ready for “the real world” (by which, in my view, always seems to mean ‘the workforce’). In this conception of education, the purpose remains to reinforce the structures of capitalism. (Why is it that companies don’t pay to train their own employees, again? Why is it that public funds are being used to train employees for private companies? I digress.) Kincaid reinforces my view about the foolishness of the ‘real world’ as a standard for our practices through a slightly different angle: “I have witnessed the justification of several unjust systems because ‘students have to get ready for the real world.’ What this basically amounts to is exposing young people to traumatic experiences in the name of preparing them to navigate the brokenness in our society.” I think about things like holding students to strict deadlines and then deducting 50% of their mark, for example, if they hand something in a day late. I think about things like forcing students to answer questions in front of the class without time to prepare because ‘that’s how the real world works.’ Underlying these practices is the idea that somehow school is not “the real world,” despite students spending most of their time in our buildings. Schools are “real world” and when we defer to some monolithic conception of the real world in the great beyond after graduation, it automatically renders schools second-class to whatever idea we have of post-school. The other objection is one Kincaid takes up: “Freedom teaching instead views the world as malleable and teaches students that they have a say in the real world that they will both shape and inherit.” Teachers and students shape the world, so we have the freedom to shape the world we want while the students are in school to prepare them for the world they’ll want to create. In Kincaid’s words, “Freedom teaching is about creating schools that reflect the society that we want our students to live in rather than reflecting the society that currently exists. For this reason, this book will speak directly about replacing oppressive systems with liberatory ones and expanding the definition of what we consider to be success to include a culturally sustaining education for all children.” I think this, too, is spot on to how I want to approach teaching as I move forward in my career.

The challenges to Kincaid’s philosophy come in the form of limiting beliefs. He enumerates a range of perspectives that shy away from radical hope and instead instill a pessimism towards liberatory practice:

“This isn’t the real world. We need to prepare students for the real world. Culturally responsive teaching practices aren’t going to raise my test scores. Restorative approaches let students off the hook when they misbehave. All of this work that I am doing to make change isn’t going to amount to anything. I do not have enough power. If only I were the principal or a district administrator. I want to engage parents, but I know what is best for their children.

I think about my other recent read, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad. In that book, he talks about how youth movements and minor protests are never taken seriously at the time of their enactment, but then lead to the kind of long-term change they seek and we revise our historical memory. I think the same is true here; we could counter these limiting beliefs by taking small actions and moving forward incrementally, even when it seems like it isn’t making a difference.

There’s been discussion in the last few years around the relative merits of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workforce. Under it, there’s an implicit racist assumption that Black people just aren’t as good as white people at being, say, a pilot (cf. I think an old Charlie Kirk clip, I think?). There’s the suggestion that DEI leads to a lowering of standards, but as Kincaid points out, “The absolute worst thing we can do in the name of anti-racism is to stop challenging our students.” Kincaid recognizes that the United States are far from being a meritocracy, but still points to the ongoing value of hard work, focus, and determination—esepcially for people of colour who want to have “a full array of choices for what they do with their lives.” This is why rigour is still encouraged (as long as it’s relevant). Kincaid notes that “we push our students to engage in rigorous tasks because we believe that they can do them. Consistently lowering rigour just reinforces external messages of inferiority.” Returning to a previous point, though, rigour without purpose—“rigour for rigour’s sake”—”can have the same detrimental effect.” He notes that having students repeatedly do hard things over and over without allowing them to experience success is a recipe for disaster. 

Implicit throughout Freedom Teaching is an asset-based mindset towards students. On the topic of whether students can do hard things (i.e. persevere throughout rigorous tasks), Kincaid notes that

“Our kids do hard things all the time. For some of them, just getting to school on a daily basis is hard. Caring for your younger siblings while your parents work is hard. Navigating the devastating effects of institutional oppression is hard. I don’t know if I ever taught a kid who couldn’t do hard things. In fact, many of my students had done more hard things by the time they were 13 sitting at one of my desks than I did in my entire lifetime.”

I think that’s a really positive note to consider. We are always pushing students for success; it would just be great to have a broader conception of what counts as success as we try to help everyone rise to their potential.

Overall, Freedom Teaching is a great outline of some principles that can help us to guide our teaching practice towards something more liberatory. I hope that we’re at the stage where we can incorporate this work and make significant change. I’d like to guarantee that we’re all that stage, but I know there’s still more work to be done. But we’ll do it. We’ll make it.

Stay optimistic and happy reading!

Dear Martin by Nic Stone

The systemic injustice perpetuated against Black Americans has been thoroughly documented in nonfiction and dramatized in television, film, and other media. On one level, the conversation is nuanced and complex, but at the same time the conversation is pretty simple: racism ensures unequal opportunities for purportedly equal Americans. Fiction can help to engage young people in these conversations, which is where books like The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas and Dear Martin by Nic Stone come in.

Dear Martin is a story about Justyce, a promising young Black man on his way to Yale. The book opens with him trying to get his drunk half-Black ex home safely by taking away her keys and loading her into the back of her car. An officer assaults him, cuffing him and accusing him of nefarious crimes. Stone balances the story of Justyce’s trauma from the encounter alongside his love triangle situation—his hot ex Melo and his debate team partner, SJ, of whom his mom would not approve because she’s White. We see the day-to-day exchanges at Justyce’s prep school, where vocal White boys like to loudly pretend that racism in America is over. The story takes a turn midway through the book—Justyce and his best friend Manny are at a stop light when a White man pulls up beside them, demanding that they turn their music down. The conflict escalates, and as Justyce reaches to turn the music down, the man shoots them both, fatally wounding Manny. The rest of the book is the fallout, the trial, and Justyce trying to work things out.

In terms of police violence narratives, I’d place Dear Martin ahead of The Hate U Give on the grounds of pace alone. Where The Hate U Give starts with a traumatic scene and then takes its time reaching a conclusion, Dear Martin moves forward at a rapid clip. Sometimes, that clip is even too quick—particularly with respect to the climax and resolution, but as a ‘teachable’ book I think it would retain more engagement from students, even if it sacrifices some of the Black joy that peppers Angie Thomas’ work.

To keep the tight clip of the book, Stone is put in a position of more rapid intensification. At times, I really appreciate that. For example, the court case gives a sample of critical conversations instead of an extended back and forth. At other times, the intensification seems a little bit convenient. For instance, at the climax of the book one of the antagonists is killed off suddenly without any ramp-up, which is pretty deflating, and, while true to life in its irresolution, feels a little narratively unsatisfying. There’s another scene where Justyce is roped into a group Hallowe’en costume of ‘stereotypes.’ He presents himself as a thug, but one of the White kids in his group goes as a Klansman. It doesn’t feel in character with Justyce, even if he is trying to fit in.

While the book has some level of the inescapable cringe of YA dialogue, the characters generally felt sincere and likable. The White boys are a little too villainous; the gang members a little too TV-movie, but in the closing scene of the book I found the interaction between Justyce and Jared at Manny’s grave genuinely moving.

From a formal standpoint, the book keeps things fresh. Stone alternates between chapters written in third person, describing Justyce’s daily goings on, and letters that Justyce writes to Martin Luther King Jr. as part of a reflection exercise. There are also sections that revert to a screenplay format replete with snappy dialogue and parts that offer one-page news reports. The style is somewhat inconsistent, but I really appreciated the big swings Stone took for a young adult fiction novel, blending theatre and reportage and the epistolary form.

I also like Stone’s use of symbolism throughout the book. There are a few different reasons that she draws attention to Justyce’s wrists—starting with handcuffs before moving on to some tender moments with SJ and a gifted watch that had been intended for his dead best friend. The resonances are a nice treat for observant readers.

The debates that get illustrated cover a range of complications and contradictions in the Black experience. I think most of the conversations would be familiar to readers, but they get presented in a way that I could see teachers engaging productively with students to address social issues. It’s always tricky when navigating using a text like this as a core novel. As a White teacher, is it my place to force Black students to read about and discuss traumatizing experiences with their predominantly White classmates, especially when the book makes reasonably frequent use of the n-word? Am I shirking my responsibilities by not teaching the book and having White students open their eyes to injustices? These questions are tough ones to navigate that can only really be answered contextually in the moment.

All things considered, Dear Martin is an engaging text that has a lot to offer to young readers. The book isn’t without its faults, but Nic Stone covers a lot of ground in what amounts to be just a few hours of reading. Fiction is a vehicle for more deeply understanding the reality of others and Dear Martin is a really nice portrait of the systemic injustice we need to continue to rail against. 

Keep up the good fight!

Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge

Reni Eddo-Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race is an extended discussion about anti-black racism systems of oppression. I would class it as part of a similar network of books, including but not limited to:

So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo
Disorientation: Being Black in the World by Ian Williams
How to be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi
Hood Feminism by Mikki Kendall
The Skin We’re In by Desmond Cole
White Fragility by Robin Diangelo
What sets Reni Eddo-Lodge’s text apart is the context. Most of the books above are from an American and Canadian context; Eddo-Lodge focuses on the British experience of race. It’s a short volume that offers a clear introduction to the experience of anti-black racism.

The book has a discussion of history, systems of oppression, white privilege, feminism, race, and class. The discussion of history was pretty illuminating and even more engaging were the specific examples of how laws had been designed to target Black folk in the UK. It was as disheartening as it was predictable that Britain’s playbook runs so parallel to that of the U.S. and how simply being Black in the street became a crime. 

Eddo-Lodge is not nearly as confrontational as the title may suggest. The personal touches she offers throughout the book strike a good balance with the objective-factual accounts. Hearing about the ire her writing ignited from white people was also, unfortunately, not surprising, but effectively narrated. It picks up on the same kinds of conversations from Ijeoma Oluo, Mikki Kendall, and Robin Diangelo’s work, where being called a racist somehow becomes more offensive than actually being racist.

I’m not doing the book justice; I have to admit I’ve been behind in my reviews and my notes on this one are pretty minimal. I think overall the book suffers from being ‘late to the party’---or at least my party. Because I’ve read similar books, this one didn’t really grip me as much as I might have expected; its discussion of white privilege didn’t shatter me in the way other books have, but if you’re getting started in your research, Eddo-Lodge is an uncommonly inviting, accessible experience.

Happy reading!

Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America by Ijeoma Oluo

It’s a little ironic that I’m here as a mediocre White man commenting on a book about the failings of the group of which I’m a part. Consider it an exercise in self-identification through reading. Ijeoma Oluo’s book Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America essentially offers an overview how catering to the mediocrity of White men in America has led to disastrous consequences for everyone else and that all of the problems we face are actually the system working according to design.

The book starts off with an engaging, and somewhat surprising description of cowboys in early America. The discourse is rooted firmly in a critique of colonialism that walks through the way that American men took charge through violence, though not through any superiority in ideas of governance. There’s a compelling account of how White men failed to engage in authentic understanding with America’s Indigenous people and Black populations, which led to offensive, reductive depictions of these cultural “Others”, which then justified widespread genocidal practices (like killing off the buffalo to ensure that food sources for Indigenous people dried up). It isn’t where I expected the book to start, and giving that angle was a refreshing way of setting the groundwork for a work of cultural studies.

The second chapter also offers a really interesting perspective about the way White men co-opt social justice movements and take the glory for themselves and the third chapter depicts how White men systematically discredit and dismantle the education system because it benefits the population that is not White men. Incidentally, Oluo points out how even the Republicans who talk about how “woke” colleges are ruining America still send their children to the most prestigious schools they can. Oluo, though, also dismantles the notion that Leftists and Liberals are smarter than their right-wing counterparts and how that mindset is demeaning, replicating our existing biases rather than moving us forward. It’s not a matter of intelligence or education. It’s a matter of empathy.

In this regard, it’s pretty interesting and controversial to take a look at one of Oluo’s key case studies. Donald Trump is an easy target. He’s mediocre in every sense. What’s most interesting to me, though, is the way that people who otherwise would have been Bernie Sanders voters moved over to Trump out of spite. They were people who wanted somebody—anybody—to shake things up, regardless of politics. At the same time, White men were still not willing to vote for a “shrill” woman (Hillary Clinton) or a woman of colour (claiming that Democrats make “too much” of race—and therefore lose). Oluo points out that Sanders’ accomplishments in the realm of social justice are still not truly representative of constituents and that he, along with other politicians, get credit for socially progressive stances while people of colour who offer the same policies are criticized for them. It’s a complex issue to navigate.

A more straightforward example of White male mediocrity crushing social justice movements is in the case of Colin Kaepernick and other football players who knelt during the national anthem. The White owners of football teams—including college teams—took measures to ensure that protest was not possible without repercussion. For instance, at the college football level, students could be removed from the team and school for one instance of protest and the inordinate fines on players and teams offered financial disincentives to speaking truth to power. I found the entire chapter really compelling in its account of injustice. 

Perhaps of all the specific examples, what stands out most to me is actually something from an early chapter. Oluo writes about how White men are allowed to be mediocre because their actions require no risk. Myself included: I could, theoretically, write something passable and get attention. Meanwhile, poc and women have to “take bigger swings” in order to make an impact. I find that idea so interesting: the idea of lack of risk leading to mediocrity could be productively explored in so many realms. 

Oluo’s text is a clear, informed argument against the continued leadership of mediocre White men. I suspect that it will ruffle a number of feathers (in the same way her book So You Want To Talk About Race? would ruffle some feathers). For that reason alone it’s worth reading. It’s challenging. It will force you to confront some difficult truths in American history and contemporary society—or, if you’re not a White man, it will affirm what you already know and provide you with the language to confront the institutions that are harming you. 

This review might not be that great. It is an act of generosity to have sticking with me so long.

Happy reading!

The Kingdom of Surfaces by Sally Wen Mao

  If you pick The Kingdom of Surfaces off the shelf, I imagine you’ll be struck by the beauty of the cover image and that you would expect the poems housed within to be similarly ornate. Imagine my surprise, then, when I began to read Sally Wen Mao’s book and found that every poem serves as a reflection of Walter Benjamin’s quote that “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” The Kingdom of Surfaces offers poems both long and short that call into question the West’s engagement with China throughout history well into the present day.

In fact, an early work in the collection, “Batshit,” addresses the way China was and is portrayed in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. Having been born in Wuhan, Mao confronts head-on the racist tropes that emerged following the outbreak. She references the fact that “some love foreign / dogs more than foreign people” (9) and that “they call eating dog barbaric, / but not police brutality” (9). The poem immediately following, “Wet Market,” further explores the shifting meaning of barbarism with reference to cultural practice.

Throughout the collection, Mao includes concrete poems (poems in the shape of things), which seems to have fallen out of vogue with “serious” poets. Here, though, it’s a refreshing take on the genre. Rather than having a poem about cats in the shape of a cat (how cutesy!), Mao replicates the shape of Ming vases to address a history of conflict, of exploitation, and of appropriation. It’s rare to see a concrete poem that addresses such meaningful issues, elevating the form to unabashedly honour the traditions from which the poet has emerged.

This work is important precisely because Western culture aims to decontextualize artistry from its origin. The titular piece of The Kingdom of Surfaces is a sustained, surrealistic piece that draws from Alice in Wonderland and the MET Gallery. The poems in that section, spanning twenty pages, each use an epigraph pulled from the exhibit at the MET China Through the Looking Glass: Fashion, Film, Art. The quotations often make claims about the work being disconnected from its context in a kind of postmodern revelation. Specifically, part of the exhibit reads as follows, provided as the epigraph for Mao’s poem “Humpty Dumpty”:

The China that unfolds before  our eyes is a China “through the looking glass,” one that is culturally and historically decontextualized. Freed from settings, past and present, the objects in this catalogue and in the exhibition galleries begin to speak for and between themselves. A narrative space opens up that is constantly being reorganized by free association. Meanings are endlessly negotiated and renegotiated.

Each poem in the section “The Kingdom of Surfaces” offers a challenge to the MET’s perspective that art can be removed from its context. The poems offer a metacommentary on museums’ accumulation processes and the appropriation inherent in exhibit art from Chinese dynasties. The culture-jamming and satirical bent of offering these quotations as a guidepost for a poem that cleverly appropriates from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (a nice little inversion of Orientalism) is a great statement on the state of curation today.

What makes the collection really powerful, though, is that this is not simply a tirade against the forces of Western culture engaged in yet another colonial exploitation. The foundations of Mao’s culture are also troubled. Take the poem “On Silk,” for example. It’s an eight page poem about the history of the silk trade, and a number of poems in the collection reference the cultivation process of silk and boiling living creatures alive in order to harvest the culturally-coded material. “Romance of the Castle Toppler” similarly tries to grapple with the treatment of women in Chinese culture, another interrogation of a heritage which has ultimately produced beauty, as well.

The poem “Paris Syndrome” really helps to reinforce that challenging disconnect. Paris Syndrome is itself an experience of failed expectations, a medical affliction recognized among Japanese and Chinese tourists to Paris, whose experience of culture shock is so intense that it creates a sense of dis-ease, sweating, anxiety, and panic. The final stanza of the poem addresses the idea of home and what expectations the speaker’s mother had for a house. The final lines of the poem read as follows: “Before we arrived in the beautiful / country, I imagined a house / with walls made of silk. // I imagined a stranger could come up to our door / and whisper a secret through its seams” (35). It’s an evocative image, both familiar and strange. The idea of the house being made of silk is not entirely comfortable, particularly when it is troubled by the other cultural and “barbaric” layers of the silk trade. The idea of a stranger whispering a secret through the seams of the house presents as intimate a scene as it is coded with danger, an alluring danger perhaps, but a danger nonetheless.

The poem immediately after is “On Silk,” which is structured around a series of vignettes that provide glimpses of history in the silk trade and its current incarnations. Mao offers some rich imagery where the speaker narrates, “When I found the water, I debated / drinking its mirage. In the desert, / everything grew wild. I expected / an expanse of death, but everything / sprouted before me, more alive / than I could ever hope to be” (43). It’s a rich and lush kind of image that is immediately undercut by the section of the poem which follows. She notes that “Every evening in the Bund, orange light / bathed the municipal buildings as I strolled. / The cameras captured every transgression— / jaywalking or loitering. On this side of the river, / memories of blood spilled. A luxury watch brand / sells time to the rivers of people walking down / East Nanjing Road” (43). There’s a coldness to the scene. The orange light takes on an ominous quality where “every transgression” is documented. In the passage that follows, there is a dystopic depiction of the skyline “sequined / with fishscale lights, projections on buildings — / cherry blossoms, ads for skin cream, and the / words I love my home in Chinese and English” (43). The passage ends with the line “Even the sky / was a bolt of silk torn in half by God” (43). The short quatrain that concludes the poem discusses “the splendour and squalor” of their collective past. It’s an appropriate phrase for characterizing the depiction of aesthetics in across the collection: splendour and squalor interlinked, and “A worm spitting / and spinning itself into a new luxury, a sensation, / finally, yes, a thing of value” (43).

While the poems often take on a political bent, they are thoroughly infused with the personal and some of those poems really standout. There’s a viscerality to the pieces, notably in the excellent piece “American Loneliness,” where personal memories are recounted and placed within the broader framework of American and Chinese culture. There are some narratives that weave in, out, and around each other for a finely crafted experience.

As you may have noticed, Mao has a knack for striking images and some poetic phrasing. The first piece in the collection is a highlight that offered a beautiful closing line; in fact, it is what compelled me to read the rest of the collection. In describing “Loquats” (after which the poem is named), the poem concludes on a compelling paradox: “A tree so pretty and snakelike / it renders you breathless, then worthless, all at once” (4). Grappling with contradictions like awe and worthlessness before the beauty of the world is compelling, but Mao twists the knife just a little bit more. The small word “then” is in conflict with “all at once.” The experience is both sequential and simultaneous, which gives that irresolvability voice and helps to nourish the pieces which follow.

The Kingdom of Surfaces is an engaging collection. If you’re interested in history, colonialism, aesthetics, and the monuments to barbarism regularly erected in the West and beyond, it has a wealth of narratives to engage with. It’s an informative collection as much as an imagistic one, and there is enough of a personal touch to breathe life into the poems (without simply being a history textbook with line breaks). It was a surprising read, far more confrontational than I would have expected, but also sincere and appreciatory and conflicted. Sally Wen Mao offers a rich collection here worthy of deep consideration.

Happy reading!