Patchwork and Polyvocality

The form and content of Nina Mingya Powles’s second collection, In the Hollow of the Wave, is guided by the craft of sewing. The book opens with a version of Slipstitch, the pamphlet Powles published with Guillemot in 2024, in which she traces the history of sewing in her family back to her grandfather through lyric poems and prose. In ‘hands’, the speaker is surprised to learn he made the family’s quilts, not her grandmother, and then ‘ashamed because of course I associate quilting & sewing with the work of women’s hands’. It was his sewing machine that everyone used, and his ‘chaotic and lovely’ quilts carry the family’s history: ‘Mum remembers the garments the squares were cut from. In each quilt block she sees a bright morning, a piano recital, a family trip to Taiwan in monsoon season’ (‘patchwork’). For Powles, fabric can hold memories as well as language, and the text is interspersed with colour photos, including images of the sky, mountains, and cloth, cut into squares, re-mixed, and laid out in larger patchwork rectangles. These gesture elegantly towards the disjointed nature of memory, hand-sewing, and writing, where fragments are stitched together to create something imperfect but valuable.

That gendered assumption about who made the family quilts is, of course, partly based on fact: ‘A post on Instagram reads, “80% of apparel is made by young women between the ages of 18 and 24 earning under the poverty line”’, Powles notes in ‘a gown is a glacier, receding’, a long piece written after an exhibition of the fashion designer Guo Pei 郭培. At the bottom of each page of this poem, a handful of lines is followed by a single sentence that looks like, but isn’t, a footnote: it’s not an explanation but an idea, fact, memory, or image to contrast with the words above, like the final haiku in a haibun or an accent colour. This seems to me another kind of patchwork poetry, and it allows Powles to make interesting leaps:

These emotive, personal lines contrast sharply with the more academic, detached ones underneath: ‘Silk embodies the white scholar’s dream to touch the distant place with his own two hands.’ The form allows Powles to dextrously hold these perspectives in tension, showing how the white scholar might ‘touch’ the fabrics but not feel these hand-me-down stories.

Powles shows the real-life consequences of this Orientalist ‘dream’ in ‘The Spell of the Red Flower’, a prose-poetry sequence circling around a disturbing interaction with a ‘white woman who said to me, please, I want to warn you, the Chinese are coming’. Elsewhere, she writes about the Korean-American writer, director, and artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha in the sequence ‘Seams, Traces’, reminding us of the violent consequences of racism and misogyny: a week after her novel Dictée was released, Cha was raped and murdered. 

But In the Hollow of the Wave is about surviving the world as it is, in spite of the dangers, and this book never feels nihilistic. Yes, Powles admits in ‘Seams, Traces’, ‘Your language of women / is the language of snow’: it will melt. But the act of creating is still a valuable act of resistance, and over the page we see a putative Cha encountering and challenging the white Renaissance art in the Metropolitan Museum: ‘She leans forward to study the curve of an angel’s hands resting in her lap […] She raises the camera.’ Alongside writing and sewing nearly all her clothes, Powles hand-stitches limited-edition pamphlets by Asian-diaspora poets for her small press Bitter Melon. In the Hollow of the Wave, like the rest of her work, offers us another way of moving through the world – with hope.

Is Olivia McCannon’s The Lives of Z sci-fi? It’s set on a planet ruined by capitalism, the climate crisis, and big tech. That could make it contemporary: ‘The water is rising’ (‘Ziggurat’), whilst ‘Plum tree, hunched, explodes blossom’ and ‘Farmer circles his field with barbed wire’ (‘Zodiac in Translation I’). But at other times the setting feels distinctly futuristic and, particularly in the ‘Celestial Questions’ series of poems, we could be in a world built by Ursula K Le Guin. Frequently, the speaker takes the neutral, inquisitive tone of a future historian or alien, referencing, for instance, ‘the Repro era’ and asking: ‘When construct took over creation, by what means could it be scrutinised?’ (‘Celestial Questions I’), and ‘When Entrepreneur E moved to Mars, what made the people willing to follow him? What warning was issued?’ (‘Celestial Questions III’). In the book’s notes, McCannon explains that these questions respond to the 2,300-year-old classical Chinese poem Tianwen (Heavenly Questions) – though if you look up ‘Tianwen’, you’ll time-travel back to China’s 2020 Mars mission of the same name. McCannon’s mash-up of eras manages not to feel gimmicky, but instead gives the sense of deep, geologic time that makes the whims and ego of Entrepreneur E seem appropriately small.

The book’s overarching project is to create a language that acknowledges that humans are part of, not separate from, the ecosystems and galaxies we live in. According to the book’s blurb and notes, the figure of Z is ‘the creative principle of life’, or a ‘translator multibeing, a plural persona’. By documenting ‘the lives of Z’, translator McCannon is fashioning a new English to verbalise what it is to be alive, not just in, but with, the universe. There are grammatical innovations: she invents new pronouns for Z – ‘zoe’ and ‘zoa’ from the Greek word for life (‘zoë’) – and for individuals she adds the subscript ‘z’ to their pronouns, as a ‘gesture towards the instability of a human considered to be e.g. 57% microbe, 40% cyborg etc.’ Meanwhile, humans are ‘humes’ (from the Latin for earth, ‘humus’), recalling for me the BFG’s ‘human beans’ – and despite this grand, academic project, a Roald-Dahlian playfulness with language is central to McCannon’s poetics. In ‘Decomposition’, she asks:

Whilst capitalism dictates that change can only be made through hard work and seriousness, McCannon argues for the power of play. She suggests we can recreate our world and change what feels overwhelmingly inevitable – like climate collapse, AI acceleration, or an unending sequence of neoliberal governments – through play, and through the imaginative possibilities that whimsy, mischief, and fun open up. McCannon’s playfulness with language then becomes political, practical, and like Powles’s work, offers another way to live. McCannon also uses wordplay to defamiliarise and re-sensitise us to what’s become horrifyingly normal. In ‘Stuck Record’, the language of war becomes a sort of nonsense list poem: ‘Happiness is / Happiness is // a Lancet kamikaze drone a Kinzhal ballistic missile a HIMARS rocket system’. The brand names of weapons are made into a list of harsh sounds and the poem ends simply:

Language is ultimately shown to be incapable of containing experience, and, quoting St Augustine in a later poem ‘Midden’, McCannon asks us to remember this: ‘[the things] / signified / should be valued more than their signs’. This is an experimental, ambitious book that rewards the studious reader, hence the extensive notes at the back – you will need them. But McCannon provides relief from the hard work. There’s humour in the contrasting registers of ‘Autoemotive Funerals’: ‘Ah, Helpless One! / I have found you lying on your side / Did you come on the M5?’ Elsewhere, straight-talking heartfelt moments cut through the cerebral: in the final poem, ‘Votive Offerings’, when asked what they want for their birthday, the speaker says:

The title of Theophilus Kwek’s fifth collection, Commonwealth, refers to both the British Commonwealth – of which Kwek’s home Singapore is a member – and one of Singapore’s oldest public housing estates, recently demolished in favour of new developments. The book is thus an exploration of how ‘these parallel and intertwined histories – of Commonwealth and the British commonwealth – have marked the lives of generations of residents’, as Kwek writes in his acknowledgements. But ‘commonwealth’ has another meaning: it’s the political ideal of a government working for the wellbeing of the public. That dream feels alive but dimmed in Kwek’s book, as the poet looks critically at contemporary systems of power, asking what (other than buildings) colonialism and capitalism have wrecked and built over.

Like his previous collection Moving House (2020), this book is principally concerned with relocation – but in Commonwealth, Singapore’s history and geography are not background context, but Kwek’s main subjects. At the book’s heart is ‘Relocations’, a multi-part poem where, through family stories, dialect, and Orwellian government-speak, he tells the story of the 1968 fire of Bukit Ho Swee. Leaving sixteen thousand people homeless, this disaster provoked the newly formed Housing and Development Board to create safer public housing for Singaporeans, demolishing the old kampongs in favour of the high-rise buildings of Commonwealth Drive and elsewhere. But in recent years, these high-rises – ‘Socialist, / so, unfit for our times’, as Kwek deadpans in ‘Pearl Bank’ – are being demolished yet again for newer projects.

Many of the pieces are love poems to the city and its people, from Raffles Institution’s gardener to Kwek’s late grandfather, a taxi driver who’d ferry around the family. Romantic love is intertwined with love for nature as the speaker’s partner grabs his hand to say ‘Look!’, to point out ‘where cement gives way / to metal, metal gives way to air’, to watch as ‘a pair – like us – though falling, rises’ (‘Flyover’). But these love poems are also elegies, attempts to memorialise what is fast changing in capitalism’s endless drive towards ‘progress’. With more overt dismay than McCannon, Kwek imagines historians looking back and explaining ‘how we shaved our own country bare […] How doubtless we were then, how sure […] building this thing, this irreparable thing.’

Kwek himself is a historian (he studied history and politics) and the polyvocality of Commonwealth is his way of allowing more voices into the stories traditionally written by the victors. Oral histories sit alongside property notices, sensational journalism alongside real estate marketing; perspectives range from Dutch philosopher Hugo Grotius to seniors bickering on a bench. Kwek’s research can occasionally feel a little overwhelming in poems like ‘Clearances’, where wordplay, irony and history are densely packed:

But at his best he skilfully weaves contradictory voices, styles, and sources together to avoid replicating the kind of linear ‘authoritative’ history you might find in a colonial textbook, creating a messier but truer record of the city-state. A late poem, ‘Morning at the Raffles Hotel’, brilliantly undercuts the idea of ‘objectivity’ in any historical account, as it recounts the real story of a tiger who escaped a zoo. The animal was ultimately shot and killed in the Raffles Hotel, named after the most notorious British coloniser of Singapore. It’s another patchwork poem, made up of sensationalising newspaper clippings (‘the WILD ANIMAL broke loose / and for two days has been ROAMING AT LARGE’) and eye-witness accounts, and, as in Powles’ book, the juxtaposition of different perspectives energises the work. When an apparently neutral voice interrupts to explain how the tiger was shot and everything resolved, Kwek deflates the authoritative tone by revealing its source:

‘Who peyntede the leon, tell me who?’ asked Chaucer’s Wyf of Bath: for Kwek, it’s ‘Who painted the tiger?’ and the answer is the hotel’s PR team. If the reader is tempted to think that the tiger in this poem might symbolise the ‘wild’ yet ‘natural’ Singaporeans killed by colonisers, he reminds us that that’s the kind of story a coloniser like Powles’s ‘white scholar’ might tell. As Kwek writes in this poem’s final section, the ‘beast, hunted, haunted instead’, and something’s haunting all of us trapped in capitalism’s cycle of extraction, construction, and destruction. But there is hope: these three collections offer alternative models of living, haunting this broken system in return.