Sally Wen Mao’s second collection of poetry Oculus has gotten a great deal of well-deserved attention. The word Oculus comes from the Latin; it means “eye.”  It can also refer to the lens of a camera, and architecturally, it’s a circular window or a circular opening at the top of a dome.  In her poetry, Sally Wen Mao uses these multiplicities of meanings as she examines the violence of spectacle. In Oculus, Mao presents the many ways in which Chinese people, most particularly women, have become spectacles for American audiences-- in life, in death, on film and online — objectified by a lens they don’t control.  Her poems excavate this history of spectacle beginning with Afong Moy the first Chinese woman to come to America and displayed to paying audiences as an oriental curio. In a series of persona poems starring Anna May Wong, Mao travels through time from silent films to the present day.  Mao also interrogates the culpability of current technology from an online suicide in 2014 to a murder that was a front page sensation and horror in 2012. Through them all, Sally Wen Mao makes clear the price these people paid and continue to pay as they hold the weight of our gaze, their visages a spectacle for others to consume, both visible and unknown. And the poet also intervenes—reanimating and resurrecting these women who have been flattened by history’s gaps and the narrowness of our stares.  Earlier this week, Sally Wen Mao spoke with me about Oculus, her attempt to create poetry that can speak through historical silences, the fluid line between image and spectacle, and the weight of representation.