Sarah Howe for Foretokens

A landmark new collection from T. S. Eliot Prize-winner Sarah Howe, navigating the complex inheritance of family, language and colonialism through the portrait of motherhood.

'Sarah Howe's soulful poems are as vivid as a river flowing through the Chinese landscape, as alive as mothers calling to their children' Xinran, author of The Good Women of China.

So begins Sarah Howe’s extraordinary new collection, returning to the riddle of belonging she explored in her award-winning debut, Loop of Jade. At the heart is her own mother’s clouded past: abandoned as a baby and taken in, at the turbulent dawn of Communist China, by a woman with her own hidden motives. Now a mother herself, Howe finds herself re-examining this unreliable narrative with fresh sight. Sifting through her own history, the poet asks, how can a new generation transform a shattered inheritance? And what is lost and gained in the pursuit?

What unfolds is a personal Babel of voices and identities, and an examination of the contradictory legacies of colonialism, where poems – past and present – act as ‘foretokens’, omens of what lies ahead. A central spine of poems takes the molecular structure of DNA as its template: a ‘ladder of atoms beginning to twist’, down which the poet steps into the darkness of time. Objects of witness resurface to tell their own stories: fragile porcelains of past centuries transiting across continents; a picture calendar of old postcards from another world.

‘From the other side of ruin / we found safe passage’, Howe writes in these spectacular poems of emotional heft and quickening wit, their voice salvaged from the fragments of a former.

'A glittering debut exploring dual British and Chinese heritage with beauty and wit' Charlotte Runcie

'[A] sinuous, shimmering, mirage-like debut collection' Scotsman

Sarah Howe was born in Hong Kong in 1983 to an English father and Chinese mother, and moved to England as a child. Her pamphlet, A Certain Chinese Encyclopedia, was published in 2009, and she received an Eric Gregory Award in 2010. She lives in Cambridge and London. Loop of Jade is her first collection, which won the T.S. Eliot Prize 2015 and the Sunday Times / PFD Young Writer of the Year Award, and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection.