Magnolia: Poems

by Nina Mingya Powles

Overview

A SPIN, Electric Literature, Book Riot, and The Catholic Post Best Poetry Collection of 2022

Finalist for the RSL Ondaatje Prize & Forward Prize for Best First Collection

A Lit Hub Most Anticipated Book of the Year

A Chicago Review of Books Best Book of the Month

Magnolia, Nina Mingya Powles’ exquisite debut poetry collection, pushes the borders of languages and poetic forms to examine memories, myths, and the experiences of a mixed-race girlhood. From Aotearoa to London, from Shanghai to New York City, these poems journey across shifting, luminescent cities in search of connection: through pop culture, through food, through vivid colors. Scenes from Mulan, Blade Runner, and In the Mood for Love braid together with silken tofu and freshly steamed baozi. At the heart of the collection is “Field notes on a downpour,” a lyrical sequence that questions the limits of translation and our ability to understand one another. Alone, the speaker recognizes that “certain languages contain more kinds of rain than others, and I have eaten them all."

Full of hunger and longing for a home that can embrace a person’s complexities, Magnolia draws on every sense to arrive at profound, yet intimate insights, and introduces readers to a brilliant new voice in poetry.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781953534217
Publisher:	Tin House Books
Publication date:	08/16/2022
Pages:	104
Sales rank:	987,539
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Nina Mingya Powles is the author of several poetry zines and chapbooks, including Girls of the Drift and field notes on a downpour, and Tiny Moons, a food memoir. In 2019, she founded Bitter Melon, a poetry press that publishes handmade chapbooks by Asian writers. Her debut collection of essays, Small Bodies of Water, was published by Canongate in the summer of 2021. Magnolia was a finalist for the 2020 Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the 2021 RSL Ondaatje Prize, and the New Zealand Book Awards. Originally from Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand, Nina currently lives in London.

Editorial Reviews

06/20/2022

The self-reflective and often stirring debut from Powles blends poetic forms and understandings of time, place, and language to examine the variations and inconsistencies of memory, pop culture, and inherited narratives. At the center of these poems are glimpses of mixed-race girlhood, including Powles’ expertly examining scenes from the Disney film Mulan while confronting their deeper impacts, “once a guy told me mixed girls are the most beautiful / because they aren’t really white / but they aren’t really Asian either.” Powles powerfully juxtaposes moments of social commentary with insights about language, noting how “in Chinese one word can lead you out of the dark/ then back into it/ in a single breath.” In the prose poems “Miyazaki Blossom,” she writes: “I feel things happening around me that are not real. I must be in a dream, or in a movie, or watching a movie on an airplane in a dream... I hear the wind begin to rise and think of how in movies, the wind is always a sound at first.” This moment captures this intriguing collection’s atmospheric tendencies, moving from real to imagined in ways that linger in the mind. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

"Captivating. . . . full of longing and wit."

Poetry Foundation

"Beguiling. . . . pushes at the edges of form to bend language into new and surprising shapes."

Chicago Review of Books

"Compelling."

Lit Hub

"Compelling. . . . graceful. . . . Powles is one of the most talented writers of her generation, and she is quickly establishing herself across multiple genres. Magnolia [has] numerous poems that linger long after you set down the book."

The Poetry Question

"Nina Mingya Powles’ Magnolia emerges out of the scalloped terrain of cinema, portraiture, dreams, and translation in which lush decay exists alongside hunger. The seemingly distant and intimate are violently reversed, splitting flesh to reveal Shanghai as the site of an expanding record of global selfhood and home. Sharpness and lightness entombed like the 'loam-eyed wolf-flowers' calling back from silence, stillness, death, and life."

E. J. Koh

"A pop-culture infused meditation on language and longing."

Largehearted Boy

"Rarely has a poetry book given so much to savor: in learning a language, in considering a film by Wong Kar-wai or Hayao Miyazaki, in biting a persimmon, in reading a subway map, in wandering the labyrinths of Eileen Chang’s Shanghai, flying through time and space. The language in Nina Mingya Powles’ Magnolia is so alive it generates tastes, sensations: 'bundles of sticky rice wrapped in leaves, freshly steamed' becomes 'heat rising up between us.' I long wanted to stay in the deep universe of this book after it was over."

Sally Wen Mao

"Sumptuous."

Shelf Awareness

"Nina Mingya Powles is a poet who writes with simultaneous elegance and wildness, opening up lyric moments from an astonishing range of sources—good breakfasts, bad movies, great movies, subway maps, cities and flowers, Chinese characters whose layers are peeled like ripe tangerines. I so love this poet’s appetite—for meaning, for music, for feasts figurative as well as literal, and for connections across histories too often kept separate. This book refuses tidy categories, speaking instead from a 'mouth [that’s] a river in full bloom."

Chen Chen

"A sensory feast. . . . readers not only have the chance to see, but to taste, smell, hear, and touch language."

Ploughshares

"Fascinating. . . . There are myriad reasons to cuddle up with this extraordinary collection."

Book Riot

"Evocative."

Poets & Writers

"Evocative. . . . a collection of complex abundance."

SPIN