A GOWN IS A GLACIER, RECEDING, Nina Mingya Powles,
handbound chapbook, 2024

A gown can be a peony

a gown can be a kelp forest

a gown can hold vast quantities of water

 

from A GOWN IS A GLACIER, RECEDING

I have Nina’s zine playlist on as I write this, having had boygenius and Phoebe Bridgers albums on replay this past week. If you go to Nina’s website you will find playlists she has created for her essay and poetry collections.

I am reading Nina’s new chapbook as though it is a gown, a glacier receding, following the top thread of lines, eyes dropping to the hem, the second narrow thread at the bottom of the page, stitched between place and fabric, ‘the cotton poplin of my dress / the changing colour of an island in the harbour’, caught in the texture and tissue of the endless possibilities of gown, ‘a gown can trace an outline of a field from one’s childhood’

to the loose threads, ‘the white scholar’s dream to touch the distant place / with his own hands’ to the the sharp needle, ‘”80% of apparel is made by young women / between the ages of 18 and 24 earning under the poverty line”‘, to

‘a departure of Said’s theory of orientalism’, stalling on pleat when ‘a pleat is a sentence written by hand on folded paper’, and there I am, pleated and stitched and folded within a gown of my own making

on the occasion of reading this exquisite chapbook, sweet sharp shine falling from museum archive to faultline to documentary to stretched jeans to grandmother stories to secondhand fabric to Sally Wen Mao’s book The Kingdom of Surfaces that responds to ‘China though the looking Glass exhibition at the Met in NYC in 2015 and the documentary The First Monday in May (2016) that chronicled its making and the accompanying Met Gala.

‘I wash the dress by hand and let it become waves, I hang it to dry by
the window and touch the sea through the fabric.’

Guo Pei: Fashion, Art, Fantasy 郭培 ：时装之幻梦 “In this Aotearoa New Zealand exclusive exhibition, experience the extravagant, breath-taking fashions of globally renowned Chinese designer Guo Pei. Drawing on influences from around the world and incorporating extraordinary fabrics and bejewelled embroidery, Guo Pei’s striking ensembles of clothing, shoes and jewellery are truly wearable works of art.” Auckand Art Gallery Toi o Tāmariki

Nina Mingya Powles is a poet and writer from Aotearoa New Zealand, based in the UK. Her debut poetry collection, Magnolia 木蘭, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and was a finalist in the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. She is also the author of several poetry pamphlets and zines. In 2018 she was one of three winners of the Women Poets Prize, and in 2019 won the inaugural Nan Shepherd Prize. Her resulting book of essays Small Bodies of Water was published in 2021. She has also published a short food memoir, Tiny Moons (2020). Nina is a pamphlet selector for the Poetry Book Society and is on the editorial committee of Starling magazine.

Note: I spotted a copy of Nina’s chapbook in a photograph of the Unity Books poetry table in Wellington. I see they still have one in stock.