Seraph Press and Food Court Books invite you to come and celebrate the launch of Magnolia 木蘭 by Nina Mingya Powles.

When: Saturday 13 March, 3 pm
Where: Food Court Books, 84 Constable Street, Newtown, Wellington

Nina will read from Magnolia 木蘭 and copies will be for sale.

For every copy of Magnolia 木蘭 you buy at the launch you’ll also receive an extra special gift (while stock lasts): a gorgeous risograph print of ‘Last eclipse’, one of the poems in the collection, which Nina has printed herself.

About the book:

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 longlisted 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.

About the author:

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. 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.

For more information

Titus Books is pre-selling three new poetry collections, by Richard
von Sturmer, Chris Holdaway and Scott Hamilton, to help cover the
costs involved in producing them.

This is in a sense a traditional subscription style of publishing,
advance selling the books, and also a new crowdfunding style, we will
send out to contributors copies of the books when they are published
and thank people inside the books by printing their names (if they
would like that). We will also include a gift publication made
especially to accompany this series.

If you would like to be involved – all contributions gratefully
received – please follow this link

There is more information about the books on the page, including the
book titles (as of yet without covers), and some options to get
involved.

THE KIPLING SOCIETY

FOUNDED 1927

Registered Charity No.278885

Hon Secretary: Michael Kipling

Bay Tree House, Doomsday Garden, Horsham, W. Sussex, RH13 6LB

email michaelrkipling@gmail.com

Echoes of ‘The Long Trail’:  The John McGivering Poetry Prize

The Kipling Society is hosting a competition for poems inspired by Rudyard Kipling’s writings, on the theme of travel. The judge is Harry Ricketts, poet, critic, anthologist and biographer of Kipling.

Kipling was a magical phrase maker, who has contributed more expressions to our language than anyone since Shakespeare.   He wrote in many voices,  which remain a pleasure to read aloud, as the Kipling Society has found in our world-wide Zoom members’ readings  during the pandemic, with readers from Britain, Europe, America, India, and New Zealand. The bard of the ‘Seven Seas’,  whose finest poems voice the desire for ‘the long trail – the trail that is always new’ was all his life in love with global travel: ‘What should they know of England who only England know?’ He wrote of the delights of Australia, where ‘Through the great South Otway gums sings the great South Main’ (‘The Flowers’), of the dangerous ‘Rio run’, skirting icebergs that groan and shift, ‘Whaur, grindin’ like the Mills o’ God, goes by the big South Drift’ (‘McAndrew’s Hymn’) – and of course his beloved North India:

            Parrots very busy in the trellised paper-vine,

And a high sun over Asia shouting “Rise and shine!”  (“Jobson’s Amen”)

In this prize competition, enabled by the generosity of the late John McGivering, whose love and knowledge of Kipling have enriched our online New Reader’s Guide,  we ask poets to draw inspiration from Kipling, not necessarily in imitation, but with something of his colour and rhythm and his fascination with people and places, as we travel  this great and wonderful world.

First Prize £350, Second Prize £100, Third Prize £50. Entry fee £5. For the competition rules or enquiries, email  KSwritingprize@gmail.com or visit here

customer asks where you’re from. you reply, auckland, and somehow he hears, start guessing, instead. he talks over you, japanese? you look japanese. are you japanese? you move over to the grill and turn all the knobs up to high heat. the flames reach out to you, tiger orange and desperate. bacon rinds curl up into carbon crisps. your three fried eggs are smouldering, but you leave them there, yolks beaming. until soot falls from your eyelashes, blushing your cheeks. until the sun turns away, saying that she’s seen enough.

Emma Shi, from ‘THE CUSTOMER IS ALWAYS RIGHT’

Fabulous cover art by Nirvana Haldar, excellent interview with Shu-Ling Chua (a Melbourne-based essayist, critic and poet) and stellar writing from young New Zealanders.

Check out the contents page and go exploring. Starling has its finger on the pulse of new writing – as it says in their aims for the journal:

‘The young writers featured here will shape and drive what New Zealand writing is to become. Starling is a chance to get a glimpse of where they might take us.’

Covid blues

It’s 4 am and Ella is singing

summertime on National Radio

and I could tell you about a broken

heart and our dead cat and body life

breaking down in pain

or the rain pounding on the roof

in the humid dark

or the way I am counting years

or last night’s birthday paella steeped in saffron and paprika

or the way loneliness can rise in gut-kicking waves

or you feel you have dissolved

in the water tank or an extravagant bath

lemongrass and majoram salted

or the plot of Rajorshi Chakraborti’s novel

or the nostalgic music we picked for the boom

as we birthday ate and sang and danced

but I want to tell you how I went

garden crazy in the first and second lockdowns

and how the garden is a gushing glut

of tomatoes beans zuchinis pumpkins herbs

the vines and tendrils knotting together

like wildfire like verbs nouns semicolons

in a poem because I never went to poetry school

and learnt straight lines and golden rules and

how yesterday I was piling warm earth on tomato roots

snipping off dead leaves feeling for the potatoes

but here I am listening to Eva Radich make her picks

wanting to pile steaming earth

on the exposed roots of this poem

because it’s 4 am and I keep repeating

myself and tying up in garden knots

It’s 4 am and the Cuban trumpet is knotting up

the Cuban piano and the Cuban trumpet is aching

for a world where we are all fed and we

are all warm and much loved and the tyrant is impeached

because crossing the party line is human good

and where we can pack the car and head north

to the booked bach for our first family holiday

in summers, and peace and kindness and wonder

are the words we picked as we passed

the birthday cake and candle glowing in the dark

Paula Green