Mao’s Mole by Marc Vincenz
Micro Review by Hélène Cardona
Mao’s Mole
Paperback: 232 pages
Publisher: NeoPoiesis Press, LLC (September 25, 2013)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0989201813
ISBN-13: 978-0989201810
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Marc Vincenz has woven himself a magic carpet. Reader, stand on it!
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Mao’s Mole is a remarkable, ambitious, intellectually stimulating book,
an extraordinary historical tour of modern China by one of our most brilliant
poets, whose clarity of vision, elegance and command of language are astounding.
“Let me tell you a secret,” one of the characters intones in the beginning.
Under Marc Vincenz’s assured guidance, the reader is regaled by “ancient
tales of villages passing through winter’s cold fingers, …fading into soft-snow
of god-sky.”
He conjures up Lewis Carroll and “would you believe it?” down the rabbit hole
we go, to places where
“wind carries the ghosts
of greedy ancestors, in the afterlife
they can’t bear to be alone.”
And “Here ice,
he says,
is metaphor for life: impossible to catch
frozen in seconds and evaporates in short winter light.”
“In China absolutely nothing is as it seems,” we’re told.
Let’s take Henry James’s words and apply them to Vincenz: he has woven himself
a magic carpet.
Reader, stand on it!
The 192 poems, ingeniously tight, read like a cinematic novel.
Vincenz quotes Liu Xiaobo: “Even if I am crushed into powder,
I will embrace you with the ashes.”
This will too.
Riddled with insight, at times tongue in cheek, poignant, heart wrenching
and grueling, these persona poems present a multitude of voices, delightful tableaux of the mundane and fantastical that leave the reader astonished.
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~ Hélène Cardona, poet, linguist, literary translator and actor, author of Dreaming My Animal Selves
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