Adventures in poetry
In the Hollow of the Wave
Nina Mingya Powles
ISBN: 9781916760226
eISBN: 9781916760233
Price: £11.99
Publication date: 24th July 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Territories: UK & Europe
Extent: 72pp
DCF: Poetry Collections
In the Hollow of the Wave, the second collection by Nina Mingya Powles examines orientalism, art and artmaking in a time of ecological crisis. Engaging with the work of artists such as Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Yayoi Kusama, Etel Adnan and the fashion designer Guo Pei, these poems rework the notion of ekphrasis into something elemental and tactile, shaped by memory and landscapes of the body.
Praise for In the Hollow of the Wave
"Nina Mingya Powles's In the Hollow of the Wave is lyrical, cloud-like, alight, fraying, and frayed. These poems are trying to trace memory, family, and history through a correspondence with what's still here, what remains, or the art and writing in the world. In the Hollow of the Wave grapples with the paradox, as stated in the poem, "Snow Fragment," it is "impossible to look" yet it is also "impossible to look away," and because of this paradox, what remains is beautiful art, like this book." – Victoria Chang
Nina Mingya Powles is a writer and poet from Aotearoa New Zealand. She is the author of several books including Slipstitch, a pamphlet of poems and collages (2024), Magnolia 木蘭 (2020), Tiny Moons: A Year of Eating in Shanghai (2020) and a collection of essays, Small Bodies of Water (2021). She writes a monthly substack on food and memory called Crispy Noodles. She has been shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Ondaatje Prize, and she was awarded the Women Poet's Prize in 2018 and the inaugural Nan Shepherd Prize for nature writing in 2019. In the Hollow of the Wave is her second collection of poems published by Nine Arches Press.
Magnolia, 木蘭, Nina Mingya Powles’ first full collection, dwells within the tender, shifting borderland between languages, and between poetic forms, to examine the shape and texture of memories, of myths, and of a mixed-race girlhood.
Abundant with multiplicities, these poems find profound, distinctive joy in sensory nourishment – in the sharing of food, in the recounting of memoirs, or vividly within nature.
Find out more about Magnolia
The Nine Arches Press blog features poems from many of our poets, as well as interviews and articles.