Sally Wen Mao’s new book of poems, “Oculus,” borrows its slightly menacing title from the Latin word for “eye,” which also refers to, among other things, a virtual-reality company and the eye-shaped skylight at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. There are eyes everywhere in “Oculus,” but not all of them are blessed with sight. Some are all-seeing, panoptic; others are yearning and blinkered, unable to return the gaze they attract. These poems are haunted by images of human faces staring out from all kinds of screens, faces that are themselves screens upon which the world projects its fantasies and anxieties. “The stories about our lives do not have faces,” Mao writes. Her strange and morally succinct book is, in part, a sustained defense of writing. Mao’s poems intervene in a culture glutted with visual images, on behalf of what she calls “the self you want to hide”—the “sad, pretty thing,” lost behind the images. “Because being seen,” she writes elsewhere, “has a different meaning to someone / with my face.”

Mao, who was born in China, lives in California. “Oculus” is her second book. Its first title poem—there are two, at the beginning and end of the book, and they operate as poles—is both elegy and investigation. In 2014, an Instagram account documented what appeared to be a suicide in Shanghai. A series of photos showed a young woman’s devastation after a breakup: in one image, her legs dangled out of her bedroom window, over the city below. The posts quickly went viral. In the poem, Mao views “the dead girl’s live / photo feed” from her own bedroom, on her own screen:

How the dead girl fell, awaiting a hand to hold,

eyes to behold her as the lights clicked on and she posed for her picture, long eyelashes

all wet, legs tapered, bright as thorns.

Instead of the missing lover’s “eyes to behold her,” there are only the eyes of peering strangers. From the other side of the world, they can look into the young woman’s home, her imagined, perhaps extinguished, life illuminating their own. Mao’s handheld device makes the woman’s lack of “a hand to hold” even more bitter. The “feed” where all this takes place exposes Mao’s hunger, and ours. These appetites, Mao suggests, are a morally serious matter: she’s both culpable and vulnerable, a consumer at grave risk of being consumed.

The poems in “Oculus” are rangy, protean, contradictory. They offer an alternative to the selfie, that static reduction of a person to her most photogenic poses. For Mao, the woman in Shanghai is just a fixed set of images. At the other end of the spectrum is Anna May Wong, the first Chinese-American movie star, who acted in Hollywood films in the nineteen-twenties and thirties, and who becomes a sort of hero in Mao’s book, appearing again and again in a sequence of poems that acts as a unifying thread. In “Anna May Wong on Silent Films,” Wong describes her own “silence” in a voice otherwise denied her. “If I bared the grooves / in my spine, made my lust known,” she reveals:

the reel would remind me

that someone with my face

could never be loved.

Wong says that, because she almost never got to kiss the romantic lead, “I had to marry / my own cinematic death,” like the character she played in “The Toll of the Sea,” a 1922 film inspired by “Madame Butterfly”—and not so unlike the Instagrammed woman, nearly a century later. A note before one poem tells us that “The Toll of the Sea” was “the first successful two-color (red and green) Technicolor feature.” Those colors, recalling the commands of a simple playground game, catalyze the poem, but wind up embodying contradiction:

GREEN means go, so run—now—

GREEN the color of the siren sea, whose favors are a mortgage upon the soul

RED means stop, before the cliffs jag downward

RED the color of the shore that welcomes

In this world, green stands for both escape and annihilation, red for both peril and relief. But in the poem new colors quickly emerge: first white, “the color of erasure,” then blue, which stands for “the ocean that drowns the liars,” “the shore where the girl keeps living,” and the place where she awakens, “prismatic, childless, free.” Mao’s imagination has picked up where the film’s clunky innovations and racist tropes faltered.

Contemporary poetry is full of scrupulously researched, rather lifeless “project” books; a lesser poet than Mao might have stuck to the historical Wong, out of some misplaced sense of fealty or respect. But Mao’s fabricated Wong is a wild creation: she has a “time machine” and rides a “comet, / to the future,” where she makes out with Bruce Lee and hangs around the set of “Chungking Express,” yet she’s also shunted into minor roles in “The Last Samurai,” “Kill Bill,” and “Memoirs of a Geisha.” Then, strangely, she goes viral as the world’s most disappointing “webcam girl.” Fully clothed, just sitting there, she performs her interiority by the most classic means imaginable, by reading “passages / from Russian novels.” Indignant “netizens” subscribe and then cancel their subscriptions, “ranting on forums / about my prudish act.” Wong is reborn as a screenshot, and her personas multiply even further: she becomes a purple panda, a hyena, and, finally, movingly, a sea creature wearing “dresses / made of kelp”:

Soon a crop of young girls will join me,

renouncing their dresses to wade

in the thrill of being animal.

It’s not any one manifestation that provides this “thrill”; it’s the plasticity of the self, delighting in its own freedom to try on different guises, new forms of camouflage, for the pure “animal” joy of change.

In “Anna May Wong Goes Viral,” Mao celebrates the imagination as a force that can transform the body, in the same way that teen-agers apply new skins chosen from a social-media app. But Mao understands that transformation is not always transcendent. In her poems, the “animal” body can also become detritus, like the carcasses of big game after the trophies have been collected. In “Teledildonics,” modern-day lotus-eaters lost behind V.R. headsets masturbate one another with long-distance sex toys; in “Provenance: A Vivisection,” flayed and preserved human bodies are put on display as part of a macabre art exhibit.