Magnolia 木蘭 
​by Nina Mingya Powles

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Home is not a place but a string of colours threaded together and knotted at one end.

Shanghai, Aotearoa, Malaysia, London—all are places poet Nina Mingya Powles calls home and not-home; from each she can be homesick for another. A gorgeous bittersweet longing and hunger runs through the poems in this new collection from one of our most exciting poetic voices.

In Magnolia 木蘭 Powles explores her experience of being mixed-race and trying to find her way through multiple languages: English, Mandarin, Hakka, Māori. Powles uses every sense to take us on a journey through cities, food and even time, weaving her story with the stories of women from history, myth and film.

The gorgeous cover features an artwork by Kerry Ann Lee.

Magnolia 木蘭 is shortlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards for the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry, and the UK edition was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for best first collection.
 
“This is a book of the body and the senses, whether the million tiny nerve endings of young love; the hunger that turns ‘your bones soft in the heat’; the painterly, edible, physical colour of flowers and the fabric lantern in the pattern of Maggie Cheung’s blue cheongsam; or ‘the soft scratchings of dusk’. These are poems of ‘warm blue longing’ and understated beauty, poems to linger over, taste, and taste again. As Powles searches for home she leaves an ‘imprint of rain’ in your dreams.”
—Alison Wong
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Download a sampler of poems from Magnolia 木蘭 (PDF, 567KB)

Bonus for the first 100 orders
The first 100 direct (from us) orders for Magnolia 木蘭 will also receive an extra special gift: a gorgeous risograph print of 'Last eclipse', one of the poems in the collection, which Nina has printed herself on her risograph printer.

About the author

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Nina Mingya Powles is a poet, zinemaker and non-fiction writer of Malaysian-Chinese and Pākehā heritage, currently living in London. She is the author of a food memoir, Tiny Moons: A Year of Eating in Shanghai (The Emma Press, 2020), poetry box-set Luminescent (Seraph Press, 2017), and several poetry chapbooks and zines, including Girls of the Drift (Seraph Press, 2014). In 2018 she was one of three winners of the inaugural Women Poets' Prize, and in 2019 won the Nan Shepherd Prize for Nature Writing. Magnolia 木蘭 was shortlisted for the 2020 Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Nina has an MA in creative writing from Victoria University of Wellington and won the 2015 Biggs Family Prize for Poetry. She is the founding editor of Bitter Melon 苦瓜, a risograph press that publishes limited-edition poetry pamphlets by Asian writers. Her collection of essays, Small Bodies of Water, is forthcoming from Canongate Books in 2021. 

​Buy Magnolia 木蘭 

​Pay by credit card or PayPal. Postage free within New Zealand. If you want to pay by direct credit, email [email protected] and we'll sort you out.
Title: Magnolia 木蘭 ​
Author: Nina Mingya Powles
Category: Poetry
ISBN: 978-0-9951082-5-7
Format:  Paperback: 220mm (tall) x 160mm (wide), 84 pages
RRP:  $30
Publication Date:  November 2020
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Trade price $15.65
Orders are ordinarily firm sale, but sale or return terms are available on request.
Contact Helen Rickerby, managing editor, Seraph Press, PO Box 25239, Wellington 6140, New Zealand
email: [email protected]
phone: (04) 385 7119

Also by Nina Mingya Powles

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Seraph Press on Facebook

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Seraph Press on Twitter
Visit Nina's website
Watch a video of the online launch of the NZ edition of Magnolia 木蘭 
Visit the Bitter Melon 苦瓜 website
Find out about the UK edition of Magnolia 木蘭, published by Nine Arches Press
Read an interview with Nina on the Forward Prize website
Read a review of Magnolia 木蘭 on the Guardian website
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Luminescent
A brilliant and unique debut collection from one of the most exciting young voices in New Zealand poetry. The five colourful chapbooks that make up Luminescent are intended to be read in any order and are gathered together in a cover folder evocative of the night-sky. More...

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Girls of the Drift
This debut chapbook features poems about real and fictional women from New Zealand history and literature, including Katherine Mansfield and some of her creations, the first permanent lighthouse keeper, the daughter of a whaler, poets Jessie Mackay and Blanche Baughan, and a school ghost. More...