Nina Mingya Powles’ debut poetry collection pushes the borders of languages and poetic forms to examine memories, myths, and the experiences of a mixed-race girlhood.
Captivating and formally various, full of longing and wit, this collection explores language and place, color and cinema...The intimate voice and the recurrent images of rain, in the form of a 'downpour,' bind the collection in a moody coherence...Dreams, colors, heat, and waves all 'pour' in and through the poems, and 'downpours,' by turns nostalgic, sultry, or cathartic, appear in films, memories, and even here, in a burst of rain and color.
Powles closes Magnolia木蘭 with the line: 'My mouth a river in full bloom'...This so accurately describes the experience of reading this collection...A gracious guide through the experience of trying to inhabit other geographic locations and languages, her invitation is for readers to taste with all their senses the details of the world around them—the more languages one knows, the more multi-flavored reality becomes, and yet, as Powles notes, there is always 'a hunger that won’t go away'...Perhaps the best way to go through life, then, is like the magnolia: 'Leafless, blushing, open-mouthed by the sea. Doused in pink, tongues out'...This is the kind of wonder that fills this collection, calling readers to savor each poem.
Tinged with feelings of guilt, the speaker explores in metaphorical terms the symptom of a society deeply entrenched in consumerism, and the individual’s potential threat to the environment...Through its inventive forms and a richly textured and nuanced language, Magnolia is an impressive, eloquent debut collection that offers multiple layers of meaning about home, identity, language and womanhood...With an assured, imaginative voice that embraces multilingual expressions and hybridity of forms, Powles reveals the convergence and gaps that exist between the personal and the universal, the authentic and the foreign, and a willingness to translate one’s complex, multicultural identity into being.
