"Informed by a deep knowledge of anatomy, physics, and mathematics, a deft and startling play of language, and a restless experimentation in form, the poems in A White Horse Is Not a Horse dissect with almost unbearable precision our human ideas of culture and identity. Who are we? Who determines the answer? Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei's photographs Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, 1995 and dissident poet Emily Dickinson's lines 'Split the Lark--and you'll find the Music'—as well as Euripides' story of the sacrifice of Iphigenia—serve as recurring metaphors for what is lost and found when we exchange one form of life for another. 'Metaphor is a precise form of turbidity,' Mao writes: a smaller country subsumed into a larger one, a homeland left behind, a language adopted or abandoned, or suspended. Lyric and political, this is a remarkable book. I really haven't read anything quite like it."

—Melissa Kwasny, judge’s citation