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, these poems find profound, distinctive joy in sensory nourishment - in the snaring of food, in the recounting of memoirs, or vividly with 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 claim and reclaim, draw afresh their own bold lines.
