Nina Mingya Powles

Tiny Moons does not read like a book or even essays really.. more like blog entries that have been reworked and put together as a book. i wish i had a loving and/or meaningful relationship with food.. but at least i can read about other people's lives. this is such a lovely little book with lovely little drawings and lovely little descriptions and stories and anecdotes about food in shanghai. overall this was a transportive collection about belonging and food. if you are looking for a book to make you feel like you are somewhere else this is the book for you… (plus d'informations)

You can really tell that Nina Mingya Powles is a poet first and foremost - this is a book of prose essays using various bodies of water (some more tenuous than others) to explore belonging, family, nature, language, identity, and home, but the language is so beautiful and poetic that there were times that it felt more like a prose poem. She is of mixed race - white European/NZ on her dad's side, and Malaysian Chinese on her mum's, and she has lived and travelled throughout the world at various points in her life, so there were lots of places and cultures to inspire her writing. She writes about bodies of water she has known from swimming pools to coastlines to monsoon rains, and yet the chapter which affected me most was more internal, about periods - it was absolutely fantastic (now there's a word I wouldn't expect to use in the same sentence as 'periods'!!!). This is really hard to categorise, although a lot of people place it in nature writing (the proposal for the book won the inaugural Nan Shepherd Prize a few years ago). It's lovely. 4/5.… (plus d'informations)