Magnolia, 木蘭 (Tin House Books, 2022) by Nina Mingya Powles is a beautifully crafted debut book of poetry, both on the inside and on the outside. The cover immediately draws the eye to its lively pastel pink and green. Within, the book contains repeating themes centered around the duality of being in two worlds, which can be seen even within the title being in two languages. Powles weaves narrative experiences with pop culture in poems about Mulan, Blade Runner 2049, Princess Mononoke and the 2016 movie called The Great Wall.

Some of the poems are prose poems while others are divided into short lyrical meditations. For example, in “Falling City,” Powles in 32 prose sections tells us about her hope to go to Shanghai to learn Chinese and reports, or meditates, on the poet Eileen Chang who is from the city. Powles often uses color to make her world come alive: Section six of “Falling City” goes, “Things that are the same: the hotel where we used to go for dim sum, the plane trees wrapped in purple stars that light up at dusk. I stand in their glow, waiting for the cars to stop.”

We see this throughout threading the book together. In “Colour Fragments,” each section is a different color: ‘blue smoke,’ ‘deep ochre,’ ‘smoke black,’ and so forth. It ties back to the theme of people often identifying themselves and each other by color.

Another example of Powles’ use of color to elevate the subject matter can be seen in the prose poem, “Maggie Cheung’s blue cheongsam”. The poem begins: “Maggie Cheung’s blue cheongsam is patterned with pink peonies. Dark magenta, dark magnolia, a colour that is edible. Nests of deep green leaves extend from the base of each fat flower, their edges painted gold. It has the same pattern as the plastic vinyl tablecloths at roadside cafes in Singapore and Malaysia, the kinds of places where my mother would have stopped of on her way home from school to sit on plastic stools and sip sweet the Tarik made of layers of fluorescent pink and green glutinous rice.” This is what the poet does best by mixing vibrant colors with a sense of time and place, bringing the narrative of the now and the memory of her mother into the realm of poetry.

She often experiments with form including a fill-in-the-blank poem, prose poems, list poems, phrasebook poems, dictionary translations, and even one that includes footnotes. These forms help bring the poet into her world of dualities, being a child of two different cultures. The book never feels heavy handed but rather exploratory as the poet looks at this world through her lens. The fluid essence of Magnolia, 木蘭 can be most felt within Section II called “Field Notes on a Downpour.” Powles writes “Some things make perfect sense… but most things do not… two days ago I smashed a glass jar of honey on the kitchen floor. The glass broke but the honey held its shards together, collapsing softly.” The reader notes the liquid sweetness is broken but still held together by the pieces, “collapsing softly.” Powles seems to have a thirst for words, for a way to make sense of the foods and colors and activities of her world, and how both her mother and herself belong.