Although I didn’t personally connect with much of this connection, I do believe it is timely and will likely resonate with a variety of readers.

I am still trying to gather my thoughts and feelings after reading Magnolia Poems. This book of poetry has filled my mind with detailed, atmospheric imagery of a world painted by swathes of neon metaphors and petal-soft motifs. While the book is written in many separate sections and subsections, everything is cohesive and readable. I would recommend this book to anyone who loves poetry, and for anyone wishing to diversify their reading.

3.5 ⭐️
"Magnolia, 木蘭" is Nina Mingya Powles's debut poetry collection. The poems mainly explore the topic of Asian identity, and feel very personal and full of emotions.

My attention was drawn to this particular collection because of its gorgeous cover. As a disclaimer, I am not a big poetry reader. English is not my first language,and even though I am very proficient in the language, the feelings that poetry usually elicits with its readers come much easier to me when reading poetry in my native language. On the topic of language though, one of the things I loved about the poems was the way the writer incorporated Chinese words and played with the Chinese language. Language, of course, is a big part of one's identity, and this incorporation of words, that English-only speakers would not be able to read, speaks to that theme of identity. I also really liked the references to movies and creators.

The poems don't really have a structure. At times, they felt more like an outpouring of feelings and thoughts. For some readers that speaks more to their emotions, but for me, personally, it did not work as well. What I really liked though, was the imagery and vivid writing style.

Thank you to NetGalley and Tin House for the e-arc. All opinions are my own. "Magnolia, 木蘭", by Nina Mingya Powles has been available since August 2022.

I loved this poetry collection! Poetry isn’t my go-to genre, but I found this work deeply relatable and it resonated with me in a way that made me feel incredibly seen. I don’t have a lot to say about it— it was simply very good and I would recommend that anyone who either likes discussions of identity or the movie Mulan go read it.

I really loved magnolia for how it painted such vivid pictures in my mind! There were parts that iI easily got lost in (in a really good way) such as the great wall poem and falling city prose. poems such as dark violets and mid-autumn moon festival, 2016 that paint the loveliest pictures with the most colorful language. I love when poems/prose can transport me to wherever the poet wants the audience to be with their writing.

Magnolia is so cinematic, images, the colors linger in the mind days after after reading (in particular, I cannot stop thinking about the image of the speaker smashing a jar of honey, its "slow collapse"). Powles considers Mulan, Miyazaki, Blade Runner, cherry blossom petals "not like snow but volcanic ash." alongside many kinds of fragmentation--of identity, of world, of otherness.

Probably more of a 3.5.

I’m not a poetry reader at all, so I frankly don’t even know the reason why I impulsively decided to pick this up. And I’m definitely not someone who can review a poetry/verse collection like this in any coherent manner.

Why I can’t really articulate to you what this whole collection was about, I could feel some of the emotions behind it, especially the ones related to belonging, not being able to understand a language that’s supposed to one’s mother tongue, that feeling of displacement from the place where one belongs to etc. And the the descriptions of food and rain in particular were very exquisite. But I can’t say the same about the complete book because there were many places where I felt lost and unable to understand what the author was trying to convey, but that’s probably just my shortcoming for being unfamiliar with the format.

However, the one thing I will remember about this is the way the author plays with the Chinese language, using homonyms as a metaphor for the various emotions the narrator is going through, the wordplay giving so many different meanings than what’s being conveyed in English, and the interplay between the two languages leads to so much more conversation and depth. I don’t know if I will read more poetry by this author but I definitely feel that I got to experience this collection.

For about the first quarter of this collection, I thought I must not be the audience because I did not feel the poetry speaking to me or moving me. And then a line touched me. But it bounced away again. And this repeated until it felt like this collection was a stone skipping across my surface and leaving ripples and wakes behind. Not every piece or movement was for me, but I feel introduced to a meaningful and matterful acquaintance whom I would like to revisit.

This was a very interesting collection of poems that made me wistful for a place and time long gone. While I haven’t lived in Shanghai, I have watched the city I love and live in change and grow; Powles describes the feeling of it slipping away from you so well. I was drawn to this book because of the number of poems referencing films and food, but found some of the poems on other topics even more moving. “Falling City” has the narrator returning to the city she used to live in and her lost romance (a recurring topic in this book) interspersed with the history of women in early 20th Century China told thru the lives of writer Eileen Cheng and actress Ruan Lingyu and “Field notes on a downpour” had me thinking about language, the double (triple, quadruple, or more) meanings of words, and translation/communication. This is great collection that I’d recommend to anyone interested in poems about China, being mixed race, love of a past lost, food, and film as a springboard for other topics.

Wow. Just wow. Magnolia is such a carefully constructed, visceral, beautiful collection. Nina Mingya Powles tugs at the heart strings in all directions. Thank you for the opportunity to read an advanced copy of this stunner of a book!

Nina Mingya Powles has a colorful and distinctive voice in her poetry. This collection of poems was vivid in its imagery and imaginative in its storytelling. I think the writing was very beautiful and I would definitely recommend her work.

Magnolia, 木蘭 by Nina Mingya Powles is a collection of insightful poetry where the writer explores her heritage. The collection has a few fragment poems that I found a bit difficult to read, but they were rather interesting since they did seem to fit the overall feeling of the collection.
I liked how Nina Mingya Powles used Chinese characters within many of the poems.
There are many lines in different poems that really seemed to call to me.
One such verse is this one:

In the dream-mirror
I open my mouth

and birds fly out from between my teeth.
They do not make a sound.
Something about that section just really called to me.

A beautiful exploration of identity. 'Magnolia, 木蘭' uses colour, language, food, popular culture, and a myriad of sensory descriptors to create an immersive and emotional experience. Despite being deeply a personal collection of works, and how different my own personal experiences have been, I found myself completely swept up in the way Powles traverses her multilingual struggles with mixed heritage, her sense of self, nostalgia, and a whole host of emotions elicited from everything from city weather to the spelling of her mothers name.

Thank you so much to Netgalley and Tin House Publishing for the opportunity to read this e-book in exchange for an honest review.

I had to take some time to form words. I loved this book. It left me speechless.I would recommend this to anyone!!

This is one of the best books of poetry I have read (and I read a lot of poetry). Powles' voice shines through in her poems. She draws you into her memories and her insecurities through descriptions that capture all the senses. Her poems highlight the beauty and deep emotions of daily life while staying accessible and grounded.

I particularly enjoyed the poems: Breakfast in Shanghai, The Great Wall, Colour Fragments, Field Notes on a Downpour, and Girl Warrior.

Definitely check this collection out.

Thank you to Tin House Publishing and NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.

Magnolia: Poems was a beautiful collection of poetry, with language that gave a great sense of place. The author is half-Chinese, and many of the poems deal with a feeling of living "in between" or straddling the line between being "white enough" or "Chinese enough". There are poems about language, not speaking the language, and the isolation that can come with that. I adored the poem "Falling City," which showed a lovely tableau of life in Shanghai, and inspired by Eileen Chang's writing. Nina Powles can make even cheap ramen sound beautiful.