Available in Ebook

Extract

A hand-stitched seascape of words and images from an award-winning writer.

I lay strips of pale peach cotton and cloud-printed cloth side by side.
Each becomes a strange, asymmetric quilt block.
Each block like a sentence, each sentence an island, all the islands loosely touching.

In her second book of poetry, Nina Mingya Powles skilfully threads together themes of belonging and material inheritance against a backdrop of verse, collage and textile. From shorelines in Aotearoa, the UK and across Asia, this collection moves through words and images to explore water and the body, sewing and artmaking, personal histories and multicultural identities. In the Hollow of the Wave questions the possibilities of what a poem can be.

Author

Nina Mingya Powles is a poet and writer from Aotearoa New Zealand, currently based in London. Her debut poetry collection, Magnolia 木蘭, was published in New Zealand, the UK and the US, and was a finalist in the Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection and the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Powles won the inaugural Women Poets’ Prize in 2018 and the inaugural Nan Shepherd Prize for under-represented nature writers in 2019. Her resulting book of essays Small Bodies of Water was published in 2021 by Canongate. She has also published a short food memoir, Tiny Moons: A Year of Eating in Shanghai (The Emma Press, 2020).

Endorsements

‘With delicate beauty and complexity, In the Hollow of the Wave explores the body and relationships, earthquakes and weather, artworks and craft, as Powles weaves hybrid identity, memory and dreams across generations, across the globe towards the uncertainty of home.’
— Alison Wong

‘I love the way this collection comes together like a quilt of memories, textures, threads, images, thoughts, ghosts, resonances and folded language, in a way that is so inviting and so expansive. I found it both comforting and exciting to read, and want to reread it over and over again.’
— Anna Jackson

Media

• ‘While many poets take the natural world as their muse, Nina Mingya Powles refashions our very understanding of it.’ – Jade Cuttle reviews for The Observer.

• ‘This collection is a coming together of all the beautiful fibres of her life.’ – Melissa Oliver reviews for RNZ Nine to Noon.

• ‘In the Hollow of the Wave is a brilliant and varied collection.’ – Marcus Hobson reviews for NZ Booklovers.

• ‘I was keen to let go of traditional ideas of what a poetry book can contain.’ – Read an interview with Nina on NZ Booklovers.

• Read an interview with Nina on The Post.