Unravelling History & The Material of Living

Join four poets for a reading that delves into the myriad personal and collective worlds, where you find stories of survival and loss; of ecological crisis and the material of living; memories of the sensous in all its skin and glitter; and the complexity of our inner selves.

On Saturday 23 May at The Community Works at 7pm, poets Mona Arshi, Troy Cabida, Nina Mingya Powles and Jennifer Wong will be sharing work from their recent collections.
Tickets are £5 (£2 concessions) - please book tickets in advance!
The building is accessible, but if you have any specific access needs, please drop us an email at [email protected] beforehand.
Mona Arshi: Arshi’s debut poetry collection, Small Hands, won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2015. Her second collection, Dear Big Gods, was published in 2019 and her novel Somebody Loves You in 2021. She has been appointed as Honorary Professor at the University of Liverpool and Fellow in Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge, and is also co-editor of an anthology of nature poetry, Nature Matters: Vital Poems from the Global Majority (Faber, 2025). Prior to her career in poetry, she worked as a human rights lawyer, often representing refugees and women fleeing domestic violence.
Troy Cabida: author of Neon Manila (2025), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. His other works include War Dove (2020), Symmetric of Bone (2024), Two Poems (2025), and Neon Manila: The Album (2025). He currently works as co-editor for fourteen poems and library assistant for the National Poetry Library.
Nina Mingya Powles: a writer and poet from Aotearoa New Zealand. She is the author of In the Hollow of the Wave (Nine Arches Press, 2025), Slipstitch, a pamphlet of poems and collages (2024), Magnolia 木蘭 (2020), Tiny Moons: A Year of Eating in Shanghai (2020) and a collection of essays, Small Bodies of Water (2021). She has been shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Ondaatje Prize, and she was awarded the Women Poet's Prize in 2018 and the inaugural Nan Shepherd Prize for nature writing.
Jennifer Wong: author of Light Year (Nine Arches Press, 2026) and 回家 Letters Home (Nine Arches Press, 2020) which received the PBS recommendation, and pamphlets including time difference (Verve, 2024).

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

Get App

Host or Publisher Oxford Poetry Library