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August 18, 2022
Nina Mingya Powles' Playlist for Her Poetry Collection "Magnolia 木蘭"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Nina Mingya Powles' poetry collection Magnolia 木蘭 is a pop culture-infused meditation on language and longing.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
"Stirring. . . . Powles powerfully juxtaposes moments of social commentary with insights about language. . . . [an] intriguing collection."
In her own words, here is Nina Mingya Powles' Book Notes music playlist for her poetry collection Magnolia 木蘭:
I’ve always made playlists. In 2003 my cousin and I each burned a CD for each other with our favourite Sum-41 and Simple Plan songs on them. As a teenager, I relished the hour-long bus ride to school every morning because it meant I could listen to the entirety of my current playlist on my iPod. The journey always took sixteen or seventeen songs. Most of my interactions with the internet at that time were to do with music: selecting songs for my MySpace page player, looking up the lyrics of a Killers song for my MSN username.
When I went to study Mandarin in Shanghai, where I’d lived as a teenager, I began writing about the city and collecting many playlists worth of songs. These songs came to me from friends, from Spotify’s shuffle algorithm, and from Shanghai itself: cafés, bars, street corners. Some songs found me later, in the years since leaving. They all contain these distant places, these past versions of myself.
‘Fake Plastic Trees’ - Radiohead
I was walking home from the subway one afternoon in Shanghai when I stumbled across a band playing on a small stage beneath a highway underpass. It might have been a local youth talent show; I wasn’t sure. But my body was pulled towards the song. I realised it was Radiohead, of course, a song I’d loved when I was fourteen. Whenever I listen to one of the many beautiful covers of this song — especially the 2021 piano version recorded by Phoebe Bridgers and Arlo Parks — I’m reminded of the teenage girl and her band surrounded by the pink and gold lights of the underpass.
‘Ribs’ - Lorde
I listened to Lorde while we drove around suburban Auckland with the windows down one summer, imagining an unreal music-video version of my own teenage years; a version where I’d lived here in the same place all my life, with the same friends, and the same landscape of sleeping volcanoes and purple skies surrounded by water. Lorde wrote ‘Ribs’ when she was fifteen and when I listen to it I feel fifteen. This is a song that takes you into someone else’s memory, building pressure in soft waves, then coming out of the tunnel in a blur of colour.
‘Flesh Without Blood’ - Grimes
Songs that you listen to at times of leaving or arriving tend to stick with you. In the weeks before leaving New Zealand for Shanghai, I felt ready to go. I couldn’t sit still. The glittering pace of ‘Flesh Without Blood’ seems to mirror the speed and colour of Shanghai when I first landed in a daze. Some parts were instantly recognisable — certain street names, the plane trees, the sci-fi skyline above the river — others startlingly unfamiliar. It’s hard to listen to this song without spinning around until you don’t know where you are.
‘Solo’ - Frank Ocean
I was listening to the album Blonde in early summer, the plum rain season in Shanghai, when it rains almost every day — dramatic, unrelenting rain. I would open my umbrella and the roar of the rain would temporarily drown out the song. I’d take cover under the trees and the warm echo of Frank Ocean’s voice would drift back in and away again under the pink and white clouds. I took lots of pictures of the clouds and tried not to send them to my crush. I was lonely and homesick. I was drawn to the song’s pure, clear notes; the way they held me.
‘Reflection’ - Christina Aguilera
Disney’s Mulan franchise is one I have many conflicting feelings about, but the soundtrack of the 1998 animated version was unmatched. Lea Salonga sang ‘Reflection’ in the movie itself, but Christina Aguilera’s version is particularly special to me, since Christina’s face graced the walls of my childhood bedroom alongside Britney and Destiny’s Child. It would be a crime not to mention here that in the late 1990s Jackie Chan recorded two versions of the song ‘I’ll Make a Man Out of You’ in Cantonese and Mandarin respectively, featuring a slow-motion kung fu montage.
‘Cooler’ - PHASES
There’s something S-Club 7-ish in the bouncy, clappy rhythms of this song, but the lyrics are angry. Musically upbeat songs with devastating lyrics is one of my favourite musical genres. ‘I guess I thought you were cooler,’ feels like an ordinary phrase, but this song tips it into near cathartic territory. This spiky song is for stomping angrily through the rain, or biking furiously down a long, empty stretch of road at night, alone.
‘A Burning Hill’ - Mitski
This song made such an impression on me that I made a zine about it. I first heard it in 2016, in my dorm room in Shanghai, discovering Mitski on YouTube and feeling something change inside me. I now realise that this marked a turning point for me as a writer. ‘A Burning Hill’ is less than two minutes long, but the words hang suspended in the air. It feels like a quiet culmination, a re-centering of the self. Something like stillness, but with a quiet feeling burning at the core: ‘I am the fire and I am the forest and I am a witness watching it.’
‘Te Ara Ika / The Path’ - Lorde
In 2021 Lorde released Te Ao Mārama, an EP of five songs from her latest album sung in te reo Māori. It is beautiful to listen to te reo sung in this way, and in the background of several songs is the low buzzing of cicadas — the backing track of every New Zealand summer. When I hear this I can see the sea. The sound fades in and out, just as I imagine it does in the poems in the second half of the book, which mostly travel back to Te Whanganui-a-tara / Wellington, where I was born. Listening to the ebb and flow of this song far from home is especially potent, and it feels like Lorde knows this feeling well.
‘Night Shift’ - Lucy Dacus
Lucy Dacus songs are complicated. They often begin with a story, melodic and meandering, but then they change track, slowing down then speeding up, soaring through space, and burning up on contact with the atmosphere. ‘Night Shift’ does this, almost like two songs folded into one, which reminds me of my own writing. The line ‘in five years I hope these songs feel like covers / dedicated to new lovers’ makes me think of how I feel about some of the poems in Magnolia 木蘭 — belonging to another time, another me.
Nina Mingya Powles is the author of the debut poetry collection Magnolia 木蘭 as well as several poetry zines and chapbooks, including Girls of the Drift and field notes on a downpour, and Tiny Moons, a food memoir. In 2019, she founded Bitter Melon, a poetry press that publishes handmade chapbooks by Asian writers. Her debut collection of essays, Small Bodies of Water, was published by Canongate in the summer of 2021. Magnolia was a finalist for the 2020 Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the 2021 RSL Ondaatje Prize, and the New Zealand Book Awards. Originally from Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand, Nina currently lives in London.
Nina Mingya Powles is the author of the debut poetry collection Magnolia 木蘭 as well as several poetry zines and chapbooks, including Girls of the Drift and field notes on a downpour, and Tiny Moons, a food memoir. In 2019, she founded Bitter Melon, a poetry press that publishes handmade chapbooks by Asian writers. Her debut collection of essays, Small Bodies of Water, was published by Canongate in the summer of 2021. Magnolia was a finalist for the 2020 Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the 2021 RSL Ondaatje Prize, and the New Zealand Book Awards. Originally from Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand, Nina currently lives in London.
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