Abattoir, Burnside Review Press, 2021.
Winner of the 2019 Burnside Review Press Book Award, judged by Darcie Dennigan.
“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.'”
—David Woo, Poetry Foundation
“The poems in [the] final section are uniformly stunning in their ability to re-make myth with living idiosyncrasy, as such work of Anne Carson does. […] In Abattoir, poems are laboratories in which we learn new things, and they are also slaughterhouses where particular, detailed lives must be drawn upon for these lessons. Mao’s collection lets us have these profits, but it makes us stare at the eyes of their sources.”
—Amanda Auerbach, Tupelo Quarterly
“Constructed as a suite of prose poems, lyric sentences, line-breaks and pauses, Mao’s is a music of exploration, speech, fragments and hesitations; a lyric that emerges from his parallel work in the sciences.”
“There are things we should not want to know if we are to stay whole, but [Mao] beckons us ever toward a spiraling reflexivity, begging us to wind ourselves tight, all the while watching how closely we graze our own skin from burning curiosity: ‘I clutch my own approach / my arms embrace or garnish this mass / known so well.’“
— Alex Braslavsky, Peripheries
Cover image by Mu Pan.