Small Bodies of Water

by Nina Mingya Powles

Home is many people and places and languages, some separated by oceans.
Nina Mingya Powles first learned to swim in Borneo – where her mother was born and her grandfather studied freshwater fish. There, the local swimming pool became her first body of water. Through her life there have been others that have meant different things, but have still been, in their own way, home: from the wild coastline of New Zealand to a pond in northwest London.
This lyrical collection of interconnected essays explores the bodies of water that separate and connect us, as well as everything from migration, food, family, earthquakes and the ancient lunisolar calendar to butterflies. In powerful prose, Small Bodies of Water weaves together personal memories, dreams and nature writing. It reflects on a girlhood spent growing up between two cultures, and explores what it means to belong.

Genres: Nonfiction, Essays, Memoir, Nature, Audiobook, Poetry, Travel

224 pages, Hardcover

First published August 5, 2021

Reviews

[emma]

nina powles is at the top of my underrated list

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 rounded up

A truly lovely collection of essays focusing on nature, swimming, self and food.

Further thoughts (probably) to come.

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved Powles’s bite-size food memoir, Tiny Moons. She won the inaugural Nan Shepherd Prize for underrepresented voices in nature writing for this work in progress, and I was eager to read more of her autobiographical essays. Watery metaphors are appropriate for a poet’s fluid narrative about moving between countries and identities. Powles grew up in a mixed-race household in New Zealand with a Malaysian Chinese mother and a white father, and now lives in London after time spent in Shanghai. Water has been her element ever since she learned to swim in a pool in Borneo, where her grandfather was a scholar of freshwater fish.

The book travels between hemispheres, seasons and languages, and once again food is a major point of reference. “I am the best at being alone when cooking and eating a soft-boiled egg,” she writes. Many of the essays are in short fragments – dated, numbered or titled. A foodstuff or water body (like the ponds at Hampstead Heath) might serve as a link: A kōwhai tree, on which the unofficial national flower of New Zealand grows, when encountered in London, collapses the miles between one home and another. Looking back months later (given I failed to take notes), this evades my grasp; it’s subtle, slippery but admirable.

Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.

[Natalie (CuriousReader)]

Will I ever tire of reading nature writing and particularly any writing related to swimming (even though I don't swim)? Probably not. This book is a beautiful collection of essays on nature and swimming but it's also so much more; being mixed-race, connecting with your ancestry through language and food, belonging, anxiety, women artists and thinkers, borders of all kinds.

Review: https://curiousreaderr.wordpress.com/...

[Larnacouer de SH · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sevdiği şeyler hakkında konuşan insanları dinlemeyi severim hatta bazen üzerine düşünürüm, benim için basit olan şeyler bir başkasının hayatında aslında ne kadar büyük bir yere sahip. Bakış açısı ne güzel şey! Kelimeler.

Bu kitabın okura verdiği his aşağı yukarı böyle işte. Okyanus, yağmurlar, fırtınalar, hafıza ve kimliğe dair bana kalırsa epey dağınık ama keyifli ve kısa bir anlatı.

[Jessica Robinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

AHHHHH. I felt like a little plant being watered after soaking up the sun 🌞

[Alison · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is a real attention-grabber in the bookstore, but I found myself having trouble getting into it. Though it's an easy read and I was interested in Mingya Powles' ideas and stories, I found it a bit difficult to move through. Other reviewers have noted that it had a calming effect, and I agree, but for me it was a bit too calming perhaps in a way that it bordered on boring. Though I could see the connections between her different essays and stories, I often struggled to find a through-line, and felt the essays were a bit disconnected. I would have liked to see a bit more cohesiveness throughout, but the writing itself felt intimate and Mingya Powles's life is just interesting in general, with her vast experience of living in many different places from such a young age. Knowing she comes from a poetry background puts the book into context a bit, and I did enjoy the way in which everything was broken up and the way the paragraphs were structured. Overall, I can appreciate the writing and stories told, but I think this one was not for me, as much as I wanted it to be.

[Hulyacln · Rating 4 out of 5]

Melez bir kadın. Yüzmeyi, kōwhai çiçeklerini, meyveleri, deniz canlılarını ve ona köklerini hatırlatan ufak detayları seviyor.
İçinden gelenleri herhangi bir sıralama gözetmiyormuşçasına yazıyor.
Önce en büyük kabusunu anlatıyor: ülkesinde öngörülen büyük depremi. Tabii ben hemen daha dikkatli okumaya başlıyorum çünkü bu korku tam da derinimde bir yerlerde yankılanıyor.
Sonra hatırladıkça ferahladığı şeylerden söz ediyor: serin bir suda kulaç atmak gibi..
Pandemiye, gurbete, ülke değiştirmeye, anadillere de değiniyor yazar Nina Mingya Powles.
‘Ağrı geçtiğinde nereye gider?’
Kitabın ufacık bir cümlesi bu örneğin, büyük büyük cümleler de yok aslında. Ama size bir şekilde çengellenen cümleler var. İki sene öncesinde evlerimizden çıkamadığımızdaki o bilinmez telaşa dair, meyve soyan elleri gördüğünüzde annenizi özlemeye dair..
Ben ‘Küçük Su Kütleleri’ni çok sevdim.
Sevdiğim şeyleri kendime hatırlattığım için. Sevdiğim şeylerin ne kadar güzel oldukları üzerine daha sık düşünüp, kendime söylemeye de karar verdim. Kitaplar gibi, hafif bir rüzgarda yürümek gibi~
.
Herhangi bir türe dahil edemeyeceğim bu güzel kitabı kesinlikle tavsiye ederim~
.
Ülkü Başaran çevirisiyle ~

[Dylan Kakoulli · Rating 4 out of 5]

From the wild waterfalls of Borneo, to the unruly coastline of New Zealand and then onto the infamous Hampstead Heath Ladies Pond, Powles weaves together the personal, political and environmental. Exploring themes of migration, food, family and those small bodies of water that can both geographically divide, and interconnect us.

Powles writing is lyrically intimate, perfectly reflecting the ebbs and flows of daily life -especially the anxieties and pressure that come with growing up between two cultures and what it means to belong when the world, and people, seem to keep drifting away from you.

With so much uncertainty in the air (especially this past year and a bit), I loved how Powles proposes that home be not just one stagnant place, but many people, places and even memories.

“Sometimes home is not a place but a collection of things that have fallen or been left behind: dried agapanthus pods, the exoskeletons of cicadas (tiny ghosts still clinging to the trees), the discarded shells of quail’s eggs on Po Po’s plate, cherry pips in the grass, the drowned chrysanthemum bud in the bottom of the teapot.”

The way nature and food can be a medium for remembering and (re)discovering really resonated with me and I enjoyed reading even more -having read Tiny Moons earlier in the year and LOVED it, of Powles own personal relationship with plant life and cooking immensely!

Small Bodies of Water seriously ignited that deep rooted longing to escape the humdrum of home life (which I’m sure you can all relate to) and dip my toes into some wild waters and experience the weightlessness of letting myself, and my worries (momentarily) float away.

4 stars

Thank you to Canongate again, for sending me this review copy!

https://www.instagram.com/elliekakoulli/

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderful book about swimming, nature, language and identity/belonging. Powles is very observant and describes everything around her so meticulously and beautifully. I could feel the water on my skin, see the colours of flowers right in front of me, and smell the food she's eating.

[Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

this book was interesting as it adds the joys of swimming and the culture of the author and a series of short stories well worth reading and easy going read

[Tash · Rating 5 out of 5]

So beautifully written, it’s almost poetic. I found some sections almost therapeutic and calming, especially her swimming descriptions

[Shanti · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nina Mingya Powles dives into a fluorescent chlorine pool in Borneo, the cool shadowy water of the Ladies Pond at Hampstead Heath, the exposed coves around the Miramar Peninsula, the green depths of a river pool in England’s Lakes District. These are her small bodies of water. In her new essay collection, Powles immerses herself in water over and over again, as a way to orient herself across continents: as she writes, “a woman’s body is a small body of water.”
These essays are encounters with many forms of belonging. Powles, who is Malaysian-Chinese and Pākehā, has lived in China, Aotearoa, and England, and in all these places she seeks homes between the boundaries of her skin and the world of air and light. Home, she says, “is a question with an impossible number of answers”.
It is easy for me to understand Powles’s writing in terms of generosity. I discovered her work this year, reading Tiny Moons, a book that charts the way that food anchored Powles to China in the year she lived in Shanghai. I swiftly followed that book with her poetry collection Magnolia 木蘭. Within her writing, there’s a freedom to understand myself as an Asian woman. In the anxiety of belonging, Powles voice collects all who share her experience: “there are so many of us whose skin, whose lineage, is split along lines of migration.” My own family has arced between Aotearoa and India for several generations, and in my pale brown skin and chipped nails, I am, like Powles, learning to notice the mechanisms of belonging, and find a grace within that.
All writing contains a certain artificiality of form, but the weirdness of reality becoming words on a page are perhaps particularly obvious in personal essays. Trust me, as a person who has taken also taken non-fiction writing classes: it is the done thing to cut up your experiences with references to books and music and poems and newspaper articles and ideas. This feels arbitrary, but it lets your personal experience mean something to more than yourself, to attach it to the lives and work of near and distant others. In Small Bodies of Water, there’s a sense that Powles researches her interests obsessively: her writing about the histories of Chinese characters, the work of artist Agnes Martin, or the British appropriation of kōwhai trees is fluidly incorporated into writing about her own period pain, homesickness, or love of tofu.
While each essay can stand alone, they circle around each other: Powles has a longing to return to places she’s been before, to see how the place has changed, and how she has. I was particularly struck by the final essay, where she thinks about the island of Borneo, where her grandparents live. She links her time in Borneo as a child and an adult to the life of her scientist grandfather and journey of English botanist Lilian Gibbs to the top of Mount Kinabalu. In doing so, Powles contemplates all the ways to encounter the violence of colonisation, and how the natural world is subjected to ideology of order and control. This thinking about how the natural world is subject to human powers reminded me of the work of anthropologist Juno Salazar Parreñas, who thinks about the way colonisation affects how endangered orangutans on the island of Borneo are cared for.
That final essay, In the Archives of Waterfalls, borrows a structure from one of Powles’s poems in Magnolia 木蘭,where each section is named after a precise colour. One particular section caught me tearful: mountain rhododendron red , the fallen flowers that blanketed the paths each March in the Himalayan forest where I grew up. Powles’s seasonal attention, oriented by senses and memory but tangled with worlds of art and literature and poetry, gives every essay a moment like this, a window into a home you might not have noticed, a place you thought you left behind.
Seven years ago, Powles was the editor of my university magazine's books section, and she has a Masters in poetry. I mention this partially because of some hometown pride but more to note that she’s qualified in the art of attention, twining the vines of her writing among the many others whose land and stories she walks through. Small Bodies of Water is exactly what non-fiction writing should be: wide-eyed and wondering, graceful and revelatory, inviting its readers at all moments to be at home in their worlds.
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initial review: extremely good! i spent all of lockdown waiting for my copy. it helped me understand how to think of myself as an Asian woman.

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[Kubi]

Nina Mingya Powles writes from a v personal perspective, yet I found myself looking out through her eyes on many occasions. But some key differences: she is white and Malaysian Chinese, and has spent much of her life shuttling across her birthplace in New Zealand, Shanghai, and London. Small Bodies of Water is an archive of what she identifies as home, from the indigenous kōwhai plant in New Zealand to her grandparents' cozy house in Kota Kinabalu, and to the bodies of water - always the water - where she swims to "reclaim herself." But later on, she also scrutinizes her simultaneous whiteness and immigrant status, her dual origins from peoples that have settled in places they didn't first belong. It's a unique intersection that she's acknowledged and seeks to better understand. Powles has previously written poetry, and that can translate differently in prose. With Powles, her language is descriptive and sensuous without being pretentious or overwrought. Interspersed with crystalline nature writing are dreamy phrases that transport us suddenly from the physical landscape to an ethereal plane. The effect is mesmerizing.

[Danielle · Rating 5 out of 5]

No book has ever made me feel this calm, ever. It's as if even just reading about water was having the same effect as being sat next to the sea, immersed in the tranquility.

Small Bodies of Water is a selection of intimate and personal essays reflecting on migration, family, language, and the different bodies of water that have shaped Nina Mingya Powles. She highlights the power of water to calm us and connect us or help to disconnect.

Weaving together a memoir style with nature writing, the essays are full of the colour and texture of nature, focusing on the flora and fauna from New Zealand to Shangai to London. It emphasises the idea that home is people, places, dreams, memories and reflections rather than one stagnant spot.

I don't often think of re-reading books, but I can see myself dipping in and out of this book again. With so much going on in the world, this book came at the perfect time to add some calm and tranquil vibes to my life.

Thanks to Canongate for sending me an advance proof copy!

🌊🌍🗺📌🌸🌻

[Hanne]

I want to be held by this book.

[Rachel]

if i could equate a book to that feeling of a warm, comforting meal followed by a relaxing evening curled up in the arms of someone that makes you feel fuzzy and safe, it would be small bodies of water. soothing, immersive and hypnotic, nina mingya powles has crafted a nature memoir like no other. this is my first experience with nature non-fiction and it probably won't be my last.

retracing the memories of powles' life from childhood to today, she submerges us into a soothing, enchanting landscape of poetic language as she takes the ordinary and turns it into something incredible. with emphasis on her relationship and proximity to water, powles examines feelings of dual identity, displacement and self-discovery against a global backdrop. each chapter incorporates different aspects of the natural world; oceans, marine and plant life, the geographical disparity between her native of new zealand and her current home in london. i found her descriptions of landscape and place so vivid, every page steeped in emotion that you can't help but allow it to wash over you.

however, this isn't a book i would recommend reading in one sitting as some aspects can be repetitive. there is very little that happens enough to warrant any kind of story, but powles recantations of childhood and identity are wrapped in such rich and evocative poetic prose that perhaps putting distance between each chapter makes for more enjoyable reading. i hope that one day powles decides to venture into fiction, because i would read whatever she's writing! a stunning, emotional and well-crafted read for those who crave and seek comfort in the world around us.

[Pia · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love every word she writes. I love how she writes so intimately about her immigrant background, racism, and the meaning of home.

[Lauren Argyle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful - perfect peaceful read for a week at home

[Fern Adams · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a unique and poetic book split into fragments. I loved that the fragments of information, stories and memories provided a beautiful metaphor for life itself and how we are all individually made up of so many different things and it is the fragments that make the whole. However I did find some sections a bit dull and struggled to really get into this, though I think that was far more me then the book. I would like to read more of Nina Mingya Powles work however and found this book has grown on me more after finishing it and having time to reflect. 3.5 stars.

[D · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn’t even finish this which says a lot because I have a hard time ever leaving something unfinished. I was cringing most of the time I was reading it, it was a little bit too much sappy-who-am-I-what-is-my-positionality-diaspora-core. I made it to page 50 before I decided to literally leave it on the train I was on, hoping someone else might pick it up and enjoy it.

[Laura · Rating 1 out of 5]

I must be missing something since it has such high ratings… I read the whole thing and didn’t feel like I had an insight on anything. Seemed flowery and disconnected.

[tbb03 · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 / 5.0

SMALL BODIES OF WATER is a gorgeous essay collection that I breezed through within a few days. Nina Mingya Powles uses nature writing to map out her emotions and reflections on topics like family, migration, culture and heritage. Growing up between Aotearoa New Zealand, Malaysia and China, and now living in London, it’s a book that asks what home is and where one belongs when ones family history is shaped by migration.

It’s difficult to narrow down what I liked most about this book. Was it the exploration of water and its many forms — ranging from different types of waves to describe menstrual pain to the act of swimming as a constant within changing environments? Or the musings on earthquakes and using their description to delineate anxiety? Or was it the keen observations on everyday actions, the poetic and concise descriptions of food, plants, seasons and sentiments? So many interesting topics kept bobbing up across the essays, each time with a new reflection, made graspable with new imagery.

The book pulled me into the author’s memories and meditations, which hung on to my thoughts when putting it aside to go about my day. I can’t wait to see what the author comes up with in the future (and will check how I can get a hold on her previous essays an

[Jaclyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderful memoir in essays that sits at the intersection of nature writing, identity exploration, food writing and the personal essay. Reminicent of Savage’s BLUEBERRIES, Hong’s MINOR FEELINGS and Zauner’s CRYING IN H MART and just as intellectually rigourous, personal, affecting and beautifully written. This book is also a wonderful addition to books about women swimming. It turns out that I love reading about swimming, especially while locked down with no chance of being able to actually swim.

[Justine · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book in mid July, from my balcony overlooking the Atlantic ocean where I grew up. From the very first lines I understood this book was going to be very special since the author's relationship to water is very similar to my own; unique, natural, essential and a life-long bond that roots us wherever we go, whatever the country we live in. Reading through these pages was like coming home without really knowing where home is anymore, all the while feeling a very strong sense of comfort and belonging.
Hands down one of the most simply yet beautifully written books I've ever read.

[Isa Guerra · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful and heartwarming! This one took me sometime to finish but it's all because it's very beautiful written. It's a book to read , to feel and think, I almost felt the textures of it and the colors and everything that is so beautifully described. This book is about this book is about emigrants and people that have roots in so many places. It's about living with your heart in so many different cultures and trying to live pursuing every single one. Small Bodies of Water is BEAUTIFUL.

[Hayden Harp · Rating 3 out of 5]

2 1/2 stars. Book 3 from my Women Writing Nature class; I didn’t love her writing style, I tend to lose interest when authors reference the pandemic, social media, and pop culture. But I appreciated her perspective as a woman with very different experiences than me, and her commentary on language and the meaning of home.

[Am · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a glorious audiobook experience. Nina narrates the audiobook on BorrowBox and it was wonderful. A memoir exploring water, swimming, produce, food, heritage, ethnicity, race, ancestry, nature, calligraphy and the onset of the Covid pandemic and it was so intricate, so gorgeously crafted and a beautiful listening experience. I would love to read a physical copy and get lost in these words once more.

How do we wrote about nature without writing an eulogy?
I can't remember the direct quote but at around 5 minutes into the audiobook, I was utterly enthralled, thoroughly recommend overall💙💙

[Thu · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars rounded up

[Adri · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my all time fav fav fav book so many shared things and places with the author, wonderful to experience fond pieces of my life through her eyes.