" why don't you write about yourself ever
people used to ask / and I didn't know why / either
in Chinese one word can lead you out of the dark / then back into it / in a single breath"
Magnolia is the debut poetry collection by poet, essayist and non-fiction writer Nina Mingya Powles, one of contemporary poetry's most exciting new international voices and the winner of the inaugural Nan Shepherd Prize for Nature Writing. These vivid, luscious poems move between journal and biography, place and belonging, all the time exploring the multitudinous facets of language and culture that make up our identity, from the sense of longing that a delicious bowl of food conjures up to the inviting glow of paper lanterns that illuminate memory and travel. Formally rich, these unique poems skilfully broaden the perspective of all a poem can hold can contain through their daring, joyful and expansive approach.
Autorentext
Nina Mingya Powles is a writer and poet from Aotearoa New Zealand. She is the author of several books including Slipstitch, a pamphlet of poems and collages (2024), Magnolia (2020), Tiny Moons: A Year of Eating in Shanghai (2020) and a collection of essays, Small Bodies of Water (2021). She writes a monthly substack on food and memory called Crispy Noodles. She has been shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Ondaatje Prize, and she was awarded the Women Poet's Prize in 2018 and the inaugural Nan Shepherd Prize for nature writing in 2019. In the Hollow of the Wave is her second collection of poems published by Nine Arches Press.
Klappentext
SHORTLISTED FOR THE FORWARD PRIZES FOR POETRY 2020 and a Poetry Book Society Choice: Magnolia, , Nina Mingya Powles' first full collection, dwells within the tender, shifting borderland between languages, and between poetic forms, to examine the shape and texture of memories, of myths, and of a mixed-race girlhood. Abundant with multiplicities, these poems find profound, distinctive joy in sensory nourishment - in the sharing of food, in the recounting of memoir, or vividly within nature. This is a poetry deeply attuned to the possibilities within layers of written, spoken and inherited words. A journal of sound, colour, rain, and light, these poems also wield their own precise and radical power to name and reclaim, draw afresh their own bold lines.