Magnolia: Poems
-
- $9.99
-
- $9.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
