Abattoir

In his debut collection, Abattoir, Angelo Mao, a Harvard scientist who studies biomaterials and tissue engineering, focuses his attention on the mice in his lab. Using them as a “metaphor for the human,” Mao nimbly investigates the ethical quandaries of dissection, how it feels to extract “the qualities of truth and doubt” from “something shivering so delicately,” what it means to open a body—“[i]ntestines curled as a / [w]horled homunculus”—with a “set of impersonal instruments / as formal as beauty.” 

Beauty in Mao’s poems is high-style, eloquent, visceral. He speaks gorgeously of a sternum “snipped and pulled / back and taut, a paper fan,” of a skull’s “immaculate ovalline lid,” of flesh “denuded of coy opacity.” In “After Francis Bacon,” the artist’s renderings of bodies as mere “meat” inspire a poetic meditation on degradation, as Mao creates “a verse / of skin, nerve” from his own subjection to the “forced, indrawn stillness” of scientific procedure. 

While mice fall short as metaphor to the extent that they fail to embody the cognitive and social complexities of people, Mao’s poems elucidate the emotions we share, like fear and pain, and the commonality of bodies—“[w]e are both here, in body.” In the affecting title poem, “Abattoir,” Mao subtly entwines his work on mice with something larger, personal identity. After a relative is diagnosed with cancer, the speaker’s mother asks, “can you help him?” even though his research is exploratory, with uncertain medical applications. In the mother’s question, I heard familial pressures that Chinese Americans often endure. And when the speaker berates himself while contemplating his dying relative in the lab’s scent-free air, I recognized a self-effacement that we as gay men sometimes present to a hostile world:

Remove your need and your hope for a cure. Have you finished 
washing everything off from the world containing birdsong? 
You will fail if they stay on your skin, like the scent rubbed 
on you from another man’s shirt.