Magnolia

SHORTLISTED FOR THE FORWARD PRIZES FOR POETRY 2020 and a Poetry Book Society Choice: Magnolia, 木蘭, 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.