INFO
| Name | Small Bodies of Water |
| Year | 2021 |
| Writer(s) | Nina Mingya Powles |
| Publisher | Canongate Books |
| Type of Text | Non-fiction |
| Artform | Literature |
ABOUT
Small Bodies of Water (2021) is an essay collection by award-winning Malaysian-Chinese and Pākehā writer Nina Mingya Powles, who is currently based in London. Structured around the motif of water, Powles uses depictions of oceans, rain, swimming pools and waterfalls to explore personal questions of belonging. Small Bodies of Water garnered national and international acclaim upon publication and was positively reviewed by Los Angeles Review of Books (USA), Times Literary Supplement (UK) and The Spinoff (NZ).
Small Bodies of Water began as an essay in 2018 published in The Willowherb Review — a UK-based digital journal that publishes nature writing by writers of colour. The essay subsequently won the Nan Shepherd Prize in 2019, which seeks to uplift “underrepresented voices in nature writing” and “broaden definitions of what nature writing can be”. The 2019 judges praised Powles’ poetic writing and sense of lyricism. Winning, as well as the ethos of the award itself, inspired Powles to expand the essay into a full collection. Reframing traditional concepts of nature writing and reflecting on the colonial and imperialist history of the genre underpin much of the resulting 2021 publication: “For me, writing about nature and colonialism is inseparable because I’m literally a product of the colonialism of different places”
Using “lyrical, powerful prose”, Small Bodies of Water (2021) investigates the tensions of growing up between multiple cultures, languages and locations through dreamy nature writing and ecopoetics - The Scotsman described Small Bodies of Water as “nature writing at its living, breathing best”. Focusing on bodies of water as a central metaphor, Powles explains that “underwater, everything is clear and quiet for a moment and all that uncertainty drops away”. The fluid, changeable properties of water often reflect Powles’ uneasy feelings around identity and belonging, and the collection is described as depicting “bodies of water not as phenomena in themselves so much as figures for personal ambivalence”.
The collection is noted for its stylistic elements of prose-poetry, listing and bilingualism, with many reviewers praising Powles’ experimentation with language and form. Award-winning British writer Robert Macfarlane comments that “its language trembles on the brink of poetry…Beautifully, dreamily, intricately”. Powles is distinctly interested in the lapses between communication and languages, particularly in relation to diaspora and migrant histories; Small Bodies of Water finds connections between English, Hakka and Mandarin, teasing apart semantic similarities and trying to find footing among the “mercurial slipperiness of language”.
Despite Small Bodies of Water often being categorised as ‘nature writing’, Powles doesn’t personally identify this way. She reflects on the nature-focus in Small Bodies of Water as being a symptom of a larger shift in literature: “I…think it’s becoming increasingly impossible to avoid writing about the way the natural world is changing due to the climate crisis, so maybe a lot of us who didn't previously think of ourselves as nature writers are becoming them."
LINKS
Key awards
2019 – Nan Shephard Prize
